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Books by Branaer Matthews 
These Many Years, Recollections of a New Yorker 


BIOGRAPHIES 


Shakspere as a Playwright 
Moliére, His Life and His Works 


EssAYS AND CRITICISMS 


The Principles of Playmaking 

French Dramatists of the 19th Century 

Pen and Ink, Essays on subjects of more or less 
importance 

Aspects of Fiction, and other Essays 

The Historical Novel, and other Essays 

Parts of Speech, Essays on English 

The Development of the Drama 

Inquiries and Opinions 

The American of the Future, and other Essays 

Gateways to Literature, and other Essays 

On Acting 

A Book About the Theater 

The Principles of Playmaking, and other Discus- 
sions of the Drama 

Essays on English 

The Tocsin of Revolt and other Essays 

Playwrights on Playmaking, and other Studies 
of the Stage 


Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local Color 


THEREIN CIRLES) OF 
PLAYMAKING 


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Uehid 
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THE PRINCIPLES OF __ 
PLAYMAKING ~ 


AND OTHER DISCUSSIONS OF K . 
THE DRAMA ouisiyal BEEZ 


BY 
BRAN ical MATTH EWS 


LUMBIA UNIVERSITY 


PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC 
ND LETTERS 


MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN met EMY Sonat 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1925 


7, 


Copyricut, 1919, By 
BRANDER MATTHEWS 


Printed in the United States of America 





TO 
GUSTAVE LANSON 


V\ 
ine 
Ny 


ny 
a ve » aa) 
OS Aa 


ae 


CATALAN 


Ar A 
EL Fah abe 


7 i 
’ ‘ vi sie 
ts Cpa taney / 


ry 
' Vite Wh oe 


iy 


ahi i 
A 





CONTENTS 
CHAPTER 


| The Principles of Playmaking . 
[! How to Write a Play 
I}! On Putting Literature into the Drama 
IV Three Theorists of the Theater . 
V If Shakspere Should Come Back 
V1 Shaksperian Stage-Traditions . 
VII The Pleasant Land of Scribia . 
VIII ‘Hamlet’ with Hamlet Left Out 
IX Situations Wanted . 
X The Playwright and the Player 
XI Jrish Plays and Irish Playwrights 
XII The Conventions of the Music-Drama 
XIII The Simplification of Stage-Scenery 


XIV The Vocabulary of the Show-Business . 


XV Matthew Arnold and the Theater . 
XVI Memories of Edwin Booth . 


vil 


163 
182 


230 
251 
265 
286 


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wal hie x toi) a sara ‘¥ 


eas vise? Te sgtohd 


Ane eragt aoa Hp) ny busing 





i 
THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


I 


F all the theorists of the theater in the nine- 

teenth century Francisque Sarcey was the 
shrewdest. He had an incomparable intimacy 
with the drama and an insatiable desire to dis- 
cover the principles of the art of playmaking. 
. Yet when he once set out to discuss these prin- 
ciples he felt obliged to begin by disclaiming any 
intention of issuing a series of edicts to be obeyed 
to the letter by all intending playwrights. “ Most 
readers,” he declared, “when you speak to them 
of a treatise on the art of the theater, or to ex- 
press it more simply, as did our fathers, when you 
speak to them of the Rules of the Drama, believe 
that you have in mind a code of precepts by the 
aid of which one is assured, if he writes, of com- 
posing a piece without faults, or if he criticizes, 
of being able to place his finger precisely on every 
defect.”” Sarcey went on to confess that this be- 
lief in the all-sufficiency of a sequence of dramatic 
dogmas was peculiarly French and that it was a 
long establisht tradition. He cited the case of the 

I 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


worthy Abbé d’Aubignac in the seventeenth cen- 
tury, who promulgated a code for dramatic liter- 
ature (translated into English under the signifi- 
cant title of the ‘Whole Art of the Stage’), and 
who was tempted later to compose a tragedy 
“according to his own formula and made it pro- 
digiously tiresome,”’—a misadventure which has 
“never cured the public of its belief in the efficacy 
of Rules.” 

Then Sarcey declared that he did not purpose 
to formulate any Rules, to promulgate any Laws, 
to mint any Maxims or to present any Precepts; 
what he proposed to himself was to seek out the 
underlying Principles of playmaking by a disin- 
terested attempt to ascertain the actual basis of 
the drama and by seizing upon the essential con- 
ditions of this art, which differentiate it from all 
the other arts. And he found this actual basis in 
the fact that “the word play carries with it the 
idea of an audience. We cannot conceive of a 
play without an audience.” All the accessories of 
performance, scenery and costumes, the stage it- 
self and its footlights, these the drama can get 
along without, but the audience is indispensable. 
‘‘A dramatic work, whatever it may be, is designed 
to be witnest by a number of persons united 
and forming an audience; that is its very es- 
sence; that is one indispensable condition of its 
existence. The audience is the necessary and 
inevitable condition to which dramatic art must 

2 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


accommodate its means.” As it is almost impos- 
sible to gather exactly the same audience two or 
three times in succession, and as no audience can 
be kept interested for more than a few hours at a 
sitting, it is a principle of playmaking that the 
dramatist must devise a dominating action and 
that he must condense his story, dealing only 
with its most interesting moments and present- 
ing it shorn of all negligible details. And as an 
audience is a crowd, composed of all sorts and 
conditions of men, the dramatist must deal with 
subjects appealing to collective human nature 
and he must eschew themes of a more limited 
attraction. 

Other critics before Sarcey had suggested that 
the playwright had always to pay attention to 
the desires and to the demands of the playgoers. 
In the sixteenth century Castelvetro had had 
more than a glimpse of this truth. In the seven- 
teenth century Moliére had boldly declared that 
the one duty of the dramatist was to please the 
public; and Corneille had said the same thing 
but characteristically with more caution. In the 
eighteenth century, Marmontel, a playwright 
himself as well as a theorist of the theater, had 
asserted that the first duty of the dramatist was 
“to move the spectators, and the second is to 
move them only in so far as they are willing to be 
moved,” which will depend “on the disposition 
and the manners of the people to whom appeal is 

3 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


made, and on the degree of sensibility they bring 
to the theater.” And in the nineteenth century, 
—and after Sarcey had started his inquiry— 
Brunetiére insisted that “a play does not begin 
to exist as a play except before the footlights, by 
virtue of the collaboration and of the complicity 
of the public, without which a play never has been 
and never can be anything more than a mere 
literary exercise.” 

Sarcey had made his declaration of faith in 
1876; and ten years later, Bronson Howard, 
wholly unfamiliar with the French critic’s articles, 
expounded a doctrine almost identical, in the lec- 
ture which he entitled the ‘Autobiography of a 
Play.’ He called attention to the fact that 
fEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides “did not 
create the laws of dramatic construction” since 
“those laws exist in the passions and sympathies 
of the human race. They existed thousands of 
years before the Father of the Drama was born,— 
waiting, like the other laws of nature to be dis- 
covered and utilized by man.” The American 
playwright declared that the dramatist could 
succeed only by obeying these laws, altho “no 
man knows much about them. ... When all 
the mysteries of humanity have been solved, the 
laws of dramatic construction can be codified 
and clearly explained; not until then.” It is 
true that “a few general principles have been dis- 
covered by experiment and discussion’: and 

4 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


yet every playwright is under the imperative 
necessity of obeying all the principles of the art, 
even those he has not discovered. Fortunately, 
“the art of obeying them is merely the art of 
using your common sense in the study of your own 
and other people’s emotions.” 


II 


In the epitaph written by Pope we are told that 


Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: 
God said, ‘‘Let Newton be!” and all was light. 


But Newton’s Law is only one of Nature’s laws; 
it declares only one of the principles which control 
the visible universe; and no Newton has yet 
arisen to declare the principles which control 
dramatic construction. These principles however 
have been obeyed unwittingly by all the great 
dramatists, ancient and modern. The Rules laid 
down tentatively or arbitrarily by the theorists of 
theater are but groping efforts to grasp the un- 
dying principles which we can seize only unsatis- 
factorily, which “exist in the passions and sym- 
pathies of the human race,” and which are never 
completely disclosed to anyone, not even if he is 
possest of the piercing insight of Aristotle. No 
doubt, this is just as true of painting and of sculp- 
ture as it is of the drama. The principles of the 
pictorial art and of the plastic art have been de- 
5 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


clared with certainty and with finality by no 
critic, not even by Lessing. 

The principle of Nature which causes an apple 
to fall from a tree is eternal; it existed and did 
its work long before Newton was able to formulate 
the Law of Gravitation; and it would continue 
to exist and to do its work even if some later and 
greater Newton should some day be able to prove 
that Newton’s Law is not just what he asserted 
it to be. What is true of Newton’s Law in 
mechanics is true also of Gresham’s Law in finance 
and of Grimm’s Law in philology. It is no less 
true of Brunetiére’s Law in the drama. The stal- 
wart French critic contended that what differen- 
tiates the drama from the epic is the necessity the 
play is under of presenting strong-willed creatures 
engaged in a tense struggle of clashing volitions; 
and the principles of dramatic construction, what- 
ever they may be, remain just what they were, 
and what they had always been before Bruneti€re 
made his suggestive and instructive effort to re- 
duce one of these principles to a formally stated 
Law. In other words, Newton’s Law and Gresh- 
am’s and Grimm’s and Brunetiére’s are not 
strictly speaking “laws” at all; they are only 
working hypotheses, which seem to square with 
the fact so far as we have been able to ascertain it. 

The Rules of the Drama which were formulated 
in the classicist code by the supersubtle Italian 
critics of the Renascence, Castelvetro, Mintorno 

6 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


and the rest, were accepted by the profest critics 
of all the other nations, altho the professional 
playwrights of England and of Spain refused to 
be driven into the triple-barred cage of the Unities 
and declined to deprive themselves of the privilege 
of commingling the comic with the tragic or to 
force themselves to fill out the artificial framework 
of five acts. Lessing battered a breach in the 
classicist citadel; and it was finally stormed and 
sacked by the fiery French romanticists of 1830. 
The Rules of the classicists were elaborated by 
pedants, who had no intimate acquaintance with 
the actual theater, where alone the principles of 
dramatic construction can be seen at work. It 
is more than probable that Castelvetro and Min- 
torno had neither of them ever seen a good play 
well acted before any other audience than an in- 
vited assembly of dilettants; and it is no won- 
der that their Rules were found to lack validity 
when put to the test in the theater itself. 

Far more valuable are the rough-and-ready 
Maxims, the bread-and-butter Precepts, which 
the old stager is forever impressing upon the 
young playwright. These Precepts and these 
Maxims, handed down from generation to genera- 
tion, studio-traditions so to speak, are valid, as 
far as they go. They are efforts to codify the 
practice of contemporary playwrights and to 
put into useful words the common sense of these 
playwrights and their study of their own emotions 

7 


THE: PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


and of the emotions of their fellows. They may 
not be adequate expressions of the eternal prin- 
ciples of playmaking, which exist and have 
always existed “in the passions and sympathies 
of the human race”; but they stand on a solider 
foundation, whatever their imcompleteness, than 
any of the alleged Rules of the pedantic theorists, 
ignorant of the actual theater with its actual 
audience. 

“Never keep a secret from the audience” !— 
“Never try to fool the audience !’’—“ Begin in 
the thick of the action, and quit when you are 
thru!’—‘“Show every thing that is important 
to the plot; don’t tell about it merely, but let the 
spectators see it for themselves !’’—these are all 
monitions of indisputable importance; and the 
’prentice playwright will do well to get them by 
heart and to take them to heart. He will even 
find profit in recalling the advice of the wily old 
stage-manager to J. R. Planché: “If you want 
to make the British public understand what you 
are doing, you must tell them that you are going 
to do it,—later you must tell them that you are 
doing it—finally you must tell them that you 
have done it; and then—confound them! perhaps 
they will understand you!” This cynical and 
contemptuous saying reveals itself as only a bru- 
tal over-statement of the undying principle that 
the audience needs ever to know what has hap- 
pened so that it may have its interest aroused 

8 


THE PRINCIPLES GF PLAYMAKING 


in what is about to happen. This is the principle 
which imposes upon the dramatist the duty of 
always being so clear that he cannot be misunder- 
stood even by the most inattentive spectator. 

The difficulty of perceiving the eternal prin- 
ciples of the dramatic art, and the distinction 
between these eternal principles and the rule-of- 
thumb precepts, will be found clearly exprest in 
Weil’s “Etudes sur le Drame Antique,’ from 
which this suggestive passage may be borrowed: 
“Poetry has its laws, natural, necessary, inherent 
in the nature of things; it has also its traditional 
rules, variable, due to habit, consecrated by in- 
heritance. The natural laws scarcely need to be 
declared as they can be understood without ef- 
fort; but easy to seize they are none the less diffi- 
cult to declare. Genius follows them instinc- 
tively; ordinary talent may hear them set forth 
without being able to conform to them. The 
traditional rules may also have a foundation; but 
they are for a time only, and they may become a 
restraint for the artist, a curb rather than a salu- 
tary check; they cannot be devined, but must be 
formulated to have the force of law.” 


Ill 


No one of these rule-of-thumb admonitions is 
older than that which advises the dramatist to 
show everything that is important and to make it 

9 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


take place before the eyes of the spectators. We 
can find it set forth in the shrewd epistle of 
good counsel, that Horace wrote to the son of 
an old friend when that youth began to manifest 
literary ambitions :— 


The events, which plays are written to unfold, 
Are either shown upon the stage, or told. 
Most true, whate’er’s transmitted thru the ear 
To mind and heart will never come so near, 
As what is set before the eyes, and each 
Spectator sees, brought full within his reach. 
Yet do not drag upon the stage what might 
Be much more fitly acted out of sight; 

Much, too, there is which ’twill be always well 
To leave the actor’s well-graced speech to tell. 
Let not Medea kill her boys in view,— 


If things like these before my eyes be thrust, 
I turn away in sceptical disgust. 


There was no living Latin drama when Horace 
made these suggestions; and he was proclaiming 
the practice of the Greek dramatic poets, when he 
warned the youthful playmaker not to let Medea 
destroy her children in view of the spectators. 
The actors of the Attic drama were raised aloft 
on thick-soled boots and they wore towering 
masks, and therefore they could not indulge in 
any violent gestures; they could neither kill 

Hae) 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


nor be killed without danger of tripping and of 
thereby disarranging the mask, a misadventure 
which would be unseemly. Yet this reservation, 
scarcely more than suggested by Horace, was by 
the Italian theorists tightened into a rigorous 
restriction of action. In England, for example, 
the first five-act tragedy in blank verse is ‘Gor- 
buduc,’ in which little or nothing happens before 
the eyes of the spectators, altho the story itself 
is filled with violent horrors, all of which are de- 
corously and dully narrated by subsidiary char- 
acters. And in France the classicists came in 
time almost to eschew visible action and to 
abound in rhetorical description of things not 
seen. 

In Victor Hugo’s famous preface to his unacted 
and unactable ‘Cromwell,’ an essay which may 
be accepted as the Declaration of Independence of 
the romanticists, he protested against the dead- 
ening results of obedience to this law by the 
feebler followers of Voltaire and Racine. “In- 
stead of actions we have narratives, instead of 
pictures we have descriptions. Solemn person- 
ages placed, like the ancient chorus between us and 
the drama, come to tell us what is being done in 
the temple, in the palace, in the public square, 
until we are often tempted to cry out to them, 
“Really,—then take us there! It seems to be 
amusing; it ought to be interesting to see!’ To 
which they would no doubt reply, ‘It is possible 

II 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


that it would amuse and interest you, but that is 
not the question: we are the guardians of the 
dignity of Melpomene in France!’ And there 
you are!” 

Yet the French classicists might have avoided 
getting themselves into this tight box if they had 
paid less attention to the later critics, even to 
Voltaire himself, and if they had gone back to 
Corneille, the father of French tragedy. Corneille 
was a born playwright, if ever there was one, with 
an instinctive apprehension of the principles of 
playmaking. Hewasa very mitigated classicist; 
in fact, he was plainly a classicist against his will 
and only in consequence of the strictures of the 
French Academy on his earliest masterpiece, the 
‘Cid.’ In his third ‘ Discourse on Dramatic Art’ 
Corneille showed a clear understanding of the 
principle which Horace had declared. “The poet 
is not obliged to put on the stage all the subsidiary 
actions which bring about the main action; he 
ought to choose those which are most advantage- 
ous to be seen, from the beauty of the spectacle 
or from the vigor and the vehemence of the pas- 
sions which they produce, or from any other ad- 
vantage they may have. And he ought to hide 
the others off the stage, letting them become 
known to the spectator either by a narration or 
by some other device of the art.” 

Here, with intuitive certainty, Corneille laid 
his finger on the reasons why certain parts of the 
story should be shown in action,—those which are 

I2 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


interesting to the audience “from the vigor and 
the vehemence of the passions they produce.” 
Here he was anticipating Robert Louis Steven- 
son’s assertion that the drama is most dramatic 
when it sets before the spectators the great pas- 
sionate crises of existence, “when duty and in- 
clination come nobly to the grapple.’”’ Here, he 
was justifying in advance Brunetiére’s Law that 
the stuff out of which drama can be made most 
effectively, is the stark assertion of the human 
will and the collision of contending desires. 
Here, once more, he was on the verge of discover- 
ing Sarcey’s most significant contribution to the 
theory of the theater,—that in any story there 
are certain episodes, interviews, moments, which 
the spectator must see for himself and which if not 
shown will leave the audience dumbly disap- 
pointed by their absence. Sarcey called these the 
scenes that must be shown, the scénes @ faire; and 
Mr. William Archer has called them the Obliga- 
tory Scenes. 

There is no characteristic of the born play- 
wright more obvious than this,—that he makes 
an immediate and an unerring choice between the 
Obligatory Scenes, which the spectators will 
expect to have placed before their eyes, and the 
less significant parts of the plot, as to which the 
audience is quite willing to be informed “either 
by a narrative or by some other device of the 
art.” In the drama, as in all the other depart- 
ments of poetry, the half is often greater than the 

13 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


whole. Indeed, since the Middle Ages the drama- 
tist has never sought to put on the stage all the 
details of his story; he has felt himself forced to 
make a choice and to focus the attention of the 
audience upon the moments which. are really 
worth while. 


IV 


In the first of his ‘Discourses on Dramatic Art,’ 
Corneille had plaintively remarkt, “It is certain 
that there are Laws of the drama, since it is an 
art; but it is not certain what these laws are.” 
And even when we have good reason to believe 
that we have at last laid hold of an indisputable 
principle, we can never be quite assured as to its 
proper application. Horace advised the avoid- 
ance of the offensively horrible; 


Let not Medea kill her boys in view. 


For the reasons already suggested the Greeks had 
to refrain from the exhibition of any murder, 
altho they seem to have had a mechanical device 
for bringing into view the gory corpse after the 
victim had been slain behind closed doors. The 
French, governed by the decorum of the court 
of Louis XIV, were content that all scenes of 
murderous violence should be left to 


The actor’s well-graced speech to tell. 
But we who speak English do not 


Turn away in sceptical disgust 
14 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


when Richard and Richmond cross swords or 
when Macbeth and Macduff at last stand face to 
face to fight to the death. Nor are we revolted 
by the murder of Desdemona, painful tho it is 
to witness, nor by the suicide of Othello. To 
some of us, no doubt, there comes a feeling of 
satiety, in the last act of ‘Hamlet,’ when the stage 
is littered with the bodies of character after 
character removed from this life by battle, murder 
and sudden death; and there are other plays of 
Shakspere’s at the performance of which some of 
us are a little annoyed by the prodigality of as- 
sassination. We are well aware that this or that 
character is doomed to die; but we would not 
object if we were spared from beholding the deep 
damnation of his taking off and if his necessary 
demise had been made known to us “either by a 
narrative or by some other device of the art.” 

It is because AEschylus and Shakspere were 
born playwrights, masters of all the devices of 
the art, that they were each of them enabled to 
move us more powerfully by an unseen murder, 
by an assassination behind closed doors, than 
we could have been moved if we had been forced 
to see the fatal stroke descend and the smitten 
victim drop. In the ‘Agamemnon’ we know 
that Clytemnestra has gone within, resolved to 
slay the husband who had wronged her and whom 
she has wronged, and we listen in dread suspense, 
not daring to hope that she will abandon her 
deadly purpose; we wait until we hear the wail- 

15 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


ing outcry of the betrayed hero, taken unawares 
and treacherously stricken in his own house. 
The only other moment in all drama which sur- 
passes this in thick intensity of expectant horror 
is that when Macbeth, goaded by the stern pur- 
pose of his ambitious wife, takes up the daggers 
and creeps into the inner chamber where Duncan, 
his king and his guest, lies sleeping the sleep from 
which he is never to awaken. It is the outcry of 
Agamemnon which tells us that he has been 
slain; and Duncan makes no outcry. We know 
that he has been slain only when Macbeth comes 
out from the room which he entered a brave man 
and which he leaves a craven from that time on. 
That an unseen murder, which we are made to 
feel impending and inevitable, is more effective 
dramatically we discover when in the same play 
we are witnesses of the later assassination of 
Banquo, which discloses itself merely a brutal 
and vulgar slaughter, devoid of horror and of 
terror. 

Jules Lemaitre once wrote a criticism of Maeter- 
linck’s tragedy of childhood, the ‘Death of Tin- 
tagiles’; and he began by quoting Horace’s 


Whate’er’s transmitted thru the ear 
To mind and heart will never come so near 
As what is set before the eyes, and each 
Spectator sees, brought full within his reach. 


Then the brilliant French critic declared that 
“this is true,—and yet it is not true. Yes, often, 
16 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


what is set before our eyes, strikes us more forci- 
bly than what is merely told; yes, action is ordi- 
narily more moving than narrative. But what is 
infinitely more pathetic than an action told or 
seen, is an action which is divined. Victor Hugo 
has said that nothing is more interesting than a 
wall behind which something is taking place.” 
And here Lemaitre and Hugo suggest to us the 
explanation why the deaths of Agamemnon and 
Duncan, which happened out of our sight behind 
a wall, are more moving than if we had seen them 
with our own eyes, because in each case we divine 
the dire event about to happen beyond our vision. 
Lemaitre remarkt that he found this blank wall 
in play after play of Maeterlinck’s; and he dis- 
covered also in Maeterlinck an unfailing power of 
forcing us to divine what was taking place behind 
the wall. Poor little Tintagiles had fled up the 
stairs of the tower till he comes to an iron gate. 
His feeble voice calls for his sister, whom we see 
trying in vain to open the gate. At last, we 
hear the sound of the little body falling on the 
far side of the door. “And this is terrible, be- 
cause we have seen nothing, not the child shivering 
with fright, not her who is not ever named, the 
wicked old woman whose hundred year old hands 
strangle the child so slowly that he has time to 
glue his mouth to the iron bars.” 

Plainly enough when Horace asserts that what 
is heard is less effective than what is seen and 
when the old stager bids the novice to “show 

17 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


everything important and let the spectators see 
it themselves,” they have neither of them been 
able to do more than draft a rough-and-ready 
Rule, which is true and yet not true. They have 
not succeeded in laying firm hold on a principle 
so certain that it is true in all cases, indisputable 
and inexorable. 


Vv 


For example, that is a sound Rule which bids 
the playwright not to keep a secret from the audi- 
ence. Bronson Howard once told me that the 
one of the dullest evenings he ever spent in the 
theater was due to the playwright’s having hidden 
from the spectators the actual facts, thus putting 
them upon a false trail. The play was a drama- 
tization of Miss Braddon’s novel ‘ Henry Dunbar,’ 
made by Tom Taylor. A daughter knows that 
her father has been wronged by Henry Dunbar 
and has been led thereby into a life of crime. She 
receives a letter from her father announcing his 
intention of seeking Henry Dunbar (who has just 
returned to England after a long stay in India), 
and of having it out with his old enemy. And 
after that she hears nothing more from her father, 
who has vanisht from the face of the earth. She 
has no doubt that Henry Dunbar has made away 
with him; so she sets out in pursuit. But 
Henry Dunbar evades her again and again, just 
when they are on the point of meeting. At last 
she corners him; and in the Henry Dunbar who 

18 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


stands at bay before her she recognizes her 
father—who has killed his enemy and assumed 
that enemy’s name and that enemy’s fortune. 
The disclosure is effective, in its way; it procures 
a shock of surprise; but the total effect is far less 
than it would have been if the spectator had 
known the facts from the first. In that case there 
would have been no shock of surprize, but there 
would have been a steadily increasing intensity 
of suspense as the daughter came nearer to the 
father whom she loved and whom she was to find 
an assassin. 

In Lessing’s implacable dissection of Vol- 
taire’s ‘Merope,’ he admits that “our surprize is 
greater if we do not know with certainty that 
/Egisthus is A2gisthus before Merope knows it. 
But what a poor amusement is this surprize! 
And why need the poet surprize us? He may sur- 
prize his characters as much as he likes; and we 
shall derive our pleasure therefrom, even if we 
have long foreseen what befals them so unex- 
pectedly. Nay, our sympathy will be the more 
vivid and the more vigorous, the longer and more 
certainly we have foreseen it.... Let the 
characters knot the complication without knowing 
it; let it be impenetrable for them; let it bring 
them without their foreknowledge nearer and 
nearer to the untying. If the characters feel 
emotion, the spectators will yield to the same 
feelings.” 

When Lessing wrote this he was a bold man, 

19 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


for he was confessing a heresy. He records his 
dissent from the Rule laid down by a majority 
of those who had written on the dramatic art and 
who insisted that the spectators should be kept 
guessing at the final solution, never permitted to 
foresee it. Even so practical a playwright as 
Lope de Vega held that it was wise to conceal 
the way in which the plot was to be wound up, 
so that the audience might not be tempted to 
get up and go out as soon as the end of the com- 
plication became visible. Voltaire, also a prac- 
tical playwright, thought that Sophocles should 
have kept the spectators of his ‘C:dipus’ in an 
ignorance of the secret as total as that which 
envelopt the characters. It was only toward 
the middle of the nineteenth century that 
Sophocles began to be praised for the very 
quality for which he had been blamed in the 
eighteenth. 

What was flagrant heresy in the eighteenth cen- 
tury is accepted as establisht dogma in the 
twentieth century. Yet even today the Rule 
that a secret must not be kept from the audience 
is only a rule-of-thumb. It is not one of the 
permanent principles of playmaking; and a 
dextrous dramatist may sometimes see his profit 
in breaking the Rule, if by so doing he can 
achieve what appears to him an intensification of 
emotional interest. Paul Hervieu called one of 
his pieces the ‘Enigma’; and he concealed from 

20 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


the spectators almost up to the falling of the final 
curtain which of two sisters had been guilty of 
admitting a detected lover by night; but it may 
be doubted whether the result of his experiment 
proved it to be justified. Perhaps he would have 
heightened his appeal if we had known from the 
beginning which was the guilty wife. “By 
means of secrecy,” said Lessing, “a poet effects 
a short surprize, but in what an enduring dis- 
quietude he could have maintained us if he had 
made no secret about it! Whoever is struck 
down in a moment, | can pity only for a moment. 
But how if | expect the blowr—How if I can see 
the storm brewing and threatening for some 
time over the head of a character?” 

None the less are there occasions where the Rule 
has to be broken, in the interest of the play as a 
whole,—that is to say, in the interest of the 
spectators themselves. In ‘Henry Dunbar’ the 
Rule not to keep a secret from the spectators was 
violated to the disadvantage of the play. But 
in Bronson Howard’s own piece, ‘Young Mrs. 
Winthrop,’ it was violated to the advantage of 
the play,—and it was deliberately violated, so 
its author told me, because it conflicted with one 
of the eternal principles of playmaking. Young 
Mrs. Winthrop is jealous because her husband is 
frequently visiting a woman whose antecedents 
are doubtful. This brings about a dispute so 
violent that Mrs. Winthrop leaves her hus- 


2r 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


band’s house. In the final act, she learns that 
her suspicions were unfounded, since her hus- 
band’s visits to her supposed rival were due to a 
highly honorable motive. But the author had 
kept this motive a secret from the spectators and 
had allowed them to believe that the jealousy of 
the wife was probably justified. When | askt 
him why he had done this, he explained that he 
needed to have his audience sympathize with his 
heroine when she left her husband and that 
the spectators must see things thru her eyes and 
believe the worst. Having only the information 
that the wife had, they would feel that her de- 
parture from her husband’s home was fully war- 
ranted. If they had known that the husband 
was innocent of any wrongdoing they would have 
credited their own knowledge to the wife and 
they would have held her to be unreasonable if 
she broke with him for a suspicion which they had 
seen to be unfounded. And in this case, the 
spectators did not resent having been kept in the 
dark, for they were not formally told that Win- 
throp was guilty,—they were merely left in doubt; 
and therefore they were ready enough to be 
pleased when he was relieved from suspicion and 
reunited to his wife. 


VI 


TuaT it is unsafe to pin faith to the Rules 
which happen to be current in our own time and to 
22 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


feel confident that they contain the law and the 
gospel was made manifest in the first half of 
the second decade of the twentieth century, 
when there happened to be produced in New York 
half-a-dozen plays characterized by an honest 
effort to find new methods of expression and to 
broaden the scope of theatrical presentation. In 
‘A Poor Little Rich Girl’ the spectators were 
made to see scenes and characters that existed 
only in the ignorant imaginings of a child in the 
grip of fever. In “Seven Keys to Baldpate’ the 
clever author played a characteristically clever 
trick upon the audience itself, most unexpectedly 
taking them into his workshop. In ‘On Trial’ 
we were invited to behold in three successive 
acts, events which took place long before the be- 
ginning of the play itself, and the event thus 
shown in the second act was earlier than that 
shown in the first act and the event shown in the 
third act was earlier than that shown in the 
second,—thus taking us further and further 
backward toward the beginning of the story. In 
the ‘Phantom Rival’ we had presented before us 
the fond day-dreams of a fanciful woman,—day- 
dreams made actually visible to us, forced to take 
on a concrete existence, and peopled by four 
contradictory possibilities of a single character, 
creations called into life only by the brooding 
imagination of the heroine. And in the ‘Big 
Idea” we were invited to witness the successive 
23 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


steps of the invention, the construction, and the 
writing of a play, which is to be built on the 
dangerous predicament in which the chief char- 
acter finds himself in the piece which is actually 
being performed; and this big idea is carried so 
far that at last we discover that the play which has 
been put together before our eyes is the very 
play which is being performed before our eyes. 

In all these dramas, serious, comic and serio- 
comic, four of them American in authorship and 
one of them freely Americanized from a Hungarian 
original, there was a deliberate intention to 
achieve novelty of form. They were all charac- 
terized by ingenuity of invention; and at least 
two of them can be credited, more or less, with the 
loftier quality of imagination. They might be 
termed new departures in the drama, due to the 
desire of their several authors to desert the beaten 
path and to explore fresh fields. They were all 
of them more or less successful on the stage; that 
is to say, the authors were able to carry the public 
with them along these hitherto untrodden trails. 
Indeed, it may as well be admitted that a consider- 
able share of the popularity of these pieces was 
directly due to the attraction exerted upon the 
spectator by the freshness of treatment which is 
their most salient quality. These plays seemed 
to not a few among those who discuss the drama 
to prove that the wisest of men was less wise than 
was his wont when he insisted that there was 

24 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


nothing new under the sun. And the favorable 
reception of this series of daring experiments in 
stagecraft was the more surprizing since the 
theater itself has always been considered ultra- 
conservative, clinging desperately to ancient 
landmarks, and struggling blindly against all 
efforts to overturn its traditions and to over- 
throw its customs. 

There is no occasion for surprize, therefore, 
that we should have been told vehemently and 
vociferously that all the traditions of the theater 
were to be abandoned, that all the customs of the 
stage were to be renounced, that all the Rules of 
the Drama were hereafter to be broken, that all the 
Laws hitherto held binding upon the playwright 
were to be repealed, and that all the principles 
of playmaking were suddenly reduced to chaotic 
confusion. ‘To many ardent aspirants for drama- 
turgic victory it seemed almost as if a bomb had 
been suddenly exploded in the temple of the 
drama, shattering the tables of the law and bring- 
ing down the walls inruin. A skilful and success- 
ful American playwright was quoted as asserting 
that “the day is not far distant when there will 
be no stage conventions, so far as the audience is 
concerned.”’ A newspaper reviewer of current 
plays felt emboldened to declare that the profes- 
sor of dramatic literature in one of our leading 
universities must be greatly grieved by the success 
of one of the five plays already cited—a play writ- 

25 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


ten by one of the professor’s former students— 
because it violated all the doctrines about the 
drama, which the professor had been discussing 
year after year. 

Now, if this happened to be true, and if the 
public should accept a play which violated the 
theories to which this professor of dramatic 
literature had drawn the attention of his classes, 
then this would go far toward disestablishing the 
validity of these theories and it would put the pro- 
fessor in a situation so awkward as to demand 
explanation, if not apology to all his former pu- 
pils. But fortunately for this professor these 
assertions as to the complete upsetting of the 
doctrines hitherto expounded by those who have 
sought to penetrate into the secrets of stagecraft, 
were not well founded. They were the result of 
a failure to perceive the wide distinction between 
the Rules and the Laws which had won acceptance 
for the moment and the eternal principles of play- 
making, which are unchanging because they are 
essential to the existence of the art. 


VII 


SINCE the five plays in which there were nov- 
elties of construction succeeded in pleasing the 
playgoers, it is safe to say that no one of them 
violated any of the eternal principles of playmak- 
ing. But did any one of them really contradict 

26 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


any of the generally accepted Precepts of the 
contemporary theater P 

It is difficult to see any reason why anybody 
should suppose that either the ‘Poor Little Rich 
Girl,’ or the “Phantom Rival,’ broke any of the 
Rules, unexpected as might be their calling upon 
the spectator to behold things that exist only 
in the imagination of one of the characters— 
things that did not happen actually but which 
that character merely believed to be happening. 
The authors of these two plays were skilful and 
careful; they made elaborate preparation; they 
led us forward step by step; they told us what 
they were going to do, what they were doing, and 
what they had done. They were so clear and so 
straightforward that they compel us to follow 
them. What they askt us to accept might be 
very unusual and in itself not easy to accept; 
but they so presented it that it was not difficult 
for us to accept. After all, the sole novelty 
lay in their asking us to witness what happened 
in a day-dream, just as a host of earlier play- 
wrights had invited the playgoer of the past to 
behold what happened ina dream. The ‘Victor- 
ine’ of four score years ago was not the earliest 
of dream-plays and the ‘Romance’ of more recent 
years will not be the last. In the ‘Phantom 
Rival’ and the ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ the actual 
novelty was not as new as it may have appeared 
to the younger generation of playgoers; and the 

27 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


authors had not needed to break any of the tra- 
ditional Precepts of the theater. 

The authors of ‘Seven Keys to Baldpate’ and 
of the “Big Idea’ were equally mindful of the 
principles of the art, and they did not try to 
“fool the audience.” In the ‘Big Idea,’ which 
was the more daring of the two amusing dramas, 
the authors took the spectator into their con- 
fidence from the beginning. We were made to 
see the hero and the heroine start to write the very 
play in which they are characters. The device 
was dangerous, and difficult of acceptance; but 
the successive scenes were so clear and they were 
so logically related, each growing out of its pre- 
decessor, naturally and irresistibly, that we could 
not help surrendering ourselves to the delight of 
watching the authors win their wager. Here 
again, we were told what they were going to do, 
what they were doing, and what they had done. 
Even the appeal of the heroine in the final act 
directly and personally to the assembled audience 
asking it to like the play which had been put 
together before its eyes and in which she was a 
character—even this was not the flagrant novelty 
that it may have seemed to some. Its most im- 
mediate predecessor is to be found in ‘Peter 
Pan,’ but it is a device for evoking laughter, 
which Moliére employed in the ‘Miser’ and 
Aristophanes in the ‘Frogs.’ 

There still remains to be considered ‘On Trial,’ 

28 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


which was hailed as the most subversive of all 
these plays, since “it told its story backward.” 
If ‘On Trial’ had told its story backward, it would 
have broken the Rule which prescribes that a 
playwright must devise an action with a beginning, 
a middle and an end, and that he must present 
these several parts in strict sequence. But, asa 
matter of fact, the author of ‘On Trial’ did not 
tell its story backward; he told it straight forward, 
altho he took the liberty of showing us in succes- 
sive acts fragments of his story which had taken 
place before the moment when he had chosen to 
begin it. His play set before us a man on trial 
for his life. The scene of every act was laid 
in the court-room, with the judge on the bench, 
the prisoner at the bar, the jury in the box and 
the opposing counsel. In the first act, the widow 
of the murdered man was called to the witness 
stand and she began to give her testimony, 
when suddenly there was a dark change and we 
were made to see in action the episode as to 
which she was about to testify; and when we had 
seen this, then there was another dark change, 
after which we found her on the stand finishing 
her testimony. In the second act, the little 
daughter of the prisoner was called as a witness; 
and again we were made spectators of the events 
as to which she was supposed to be testifying. 
In the third act when the wife of the prisoner was 
summoned to the stand, we were once more in- 
29 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


vited to be spectators of the thing itself instead 
of being merely listeners to her testimony. If 
these three witnesses had been allowed to give 
their evidence in their own words, no one would 
have suggested that the story was being told 
backward, because every playgoer knows that in 
every play there are events which happened long 
before the play began and which can be made 
known to the audience only by a telling after the 
event has happened. The author of ‘On Trial’ 
did not break any of the Rules; he was merely 
inventive enough and ingenious enough to devise 
a new way of making visible to us in the present 
what had taken place in the past. The novelty 
was in the method of presentation and not in any 
departure from the Precepts generally accepted 
in the theater. 


(1914-16.) 


30 


I] 
HOW TO WRITE A PLAY 


I 


HE title of this paper may seem presumptu- 
ous. Who am | that I should presume to 
proffer instruction in the art of the playwright, as 
difficult as it is dangerous? If this hurrying 
twentieth century of ours were only the leisurely 
eighteenth century, when everybody had all the 
time there was, a fit name for this paper might 
be: “A few tentative Suggestions for those who 
propose to commence Playwrights, garnered from 
the Experience of an old Playgoer.”’ That may 
be a more accurate, as it is a more cautious, 
description of the intent of the present paper; 
but it is a little too long drawn to serve as a 
title for an article on a topic of immediate inter- 
est to an immense number of ambitious aspirants. 
It has been calculated by an imaginative statis- 
ticlan that there are now in these United States 
nearly one hundred thousand persons—men, 
women and children—who are eager to write 
plays, believing that the stage door is the easiest 
entrance to the Temple of Fortune and to the 
31 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Hall of Fame. Whether or not this estimate is 
scientifically accurate may not be disclosed even 
when we have the figures of the new census. 
Quite possibly it is not at all inflated, since it al- 
lows only one apprentice playmaker to every 
thousand of the population. At all events, there 
are so many of them that advertisements have ap- 
peared of late addressed especially to those igno- 
rant of dramatic art and yet ambitious to acquire 
it. “Playwriting Taught by Mail” is an alluring 
temptation which is probably charming subscrip- 
tions from the pockets of many an eager youth. 
Whether or not playwriting can really be 
taught by mail is a question that need not here 
be discust. What is not a question is that it 
can be taught, even if these advertisers may 
not be capable of teaching it. Playwriting is an 
art and every art must be learnt; and whatever 
must be learned can be taught—whether it is the 
art of painting a portrait, of riming a lyric, of 
making a speech or of writing a play. It is true 
that the poet is born, not made; but it is also 
true that after he is born he has to be made. 
What he has to say may be the gift of God, but 
how he ts to say it depends upon the training of the 
bard himself. In every artist we can perceive a 
man with both a message and a method. His 
message may be innate in him, but his method 
he has to acquire from others. The painters 
have recognized this; and they promptly go to 
32 


HOW TO WRITE A PLAY 


school to the older practitioners of the craft that 
they may imbibe its secrets and be shown how to 
set a palette and how to bring out on the canvas 
before them the things they see in the world 
around them. Every painter is the pupil of one 
or more painters of an earlier generation; and he 
is proud of it as a proof that he has served his 
apprenticeship and learnt his trade properly. 
Whatever has to be learnt can be taught; but 
it can be taught best by those who have practised 
it themselves. The instructors in the art schools 
are painters, not art critics or historians of art. 
And, if playwriting is to be taught with the same 
success that painting has been taught, this can 
be accomplisht only by the older playwrights 
instructing the younger and laying bare before 
them the art and mystery of the drama. Ifa 
school of playwriting were to be opened the 
proper instructors would be Mr. Gillette and Mr. 
Augustus Thomas in the United States, and 
Sir Arthur Pinero and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones 
in Great Britain. In France, more than half-a- 
century ago, there was for a while something very 
like a school of playwriting kept by a master play- 
wright, Scribe—that is to say, Scribe liked to 
collaborate and he was hospitable to the young 
men who brought him suggestions for plays. 
He showed these young men how their sugges- 
tions could be turned to profit on the stage. 
And in this collaboration the young men could 
33 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


not fail to get an insight into Scribe’s method 
and to discover some of the reasons why Scribe’s 
plays were incessantly reappearing in all the 
theaters of Europe. 

And yet a mere critic, a mere historian of the 
drama, may on occasion be able to proffer ad- 
vice, not so much to the point, perhaps, as would 
be that of the successful playwright, but not with- 
out a certain value of its own, however inferior. 
When anyone has been intensely interested in the 
drama for more than forty years, and when he 
has been an assiduous playgoer in many cities, 
and when he has taken advantage of every op- 
portunity to discuss the problems of playmaking 
with the many dramatists he has had the good 
fortune to count among his friends—it may not 
be unreasonable for him to assume that it is in 
his power to call attention to a few of the more 
obvious points which the ambitious young dram- 
atic author must ever bear in mind. He may 
not be justified in advertising “Playwriting 
Taught by Mail,” but he ought to be able to make 
a few elementary suggestions. 

The first of these obvious considerations for 
the benefit of the ’prentice playwright is that he 
ought to devote himself to playgoing. Nearly 
forty years ago, when | hoped that I might be- 
come a professional playwright, | introduced 
myself to the late Eugéne Nus, the author of the 
French originals of Charles Reade’s ‘Hard Cash,’ 


34 


HOW TO WRITE A PLAY 


Boucicault’s ‘Streets of New York,’ and Tom 
Taylor’s ‘Ticket-of-Leave Man.’ Tho the play 
plotted as a result of this introduction was 
never actually written, one remark of the veteran 
French playmaker may be recalled: “Young 
man, if you want to write for the theater you must 
go to the theater.” Every writer of plays must 
be intimately familiar with the theater of his own 
time and his own country, since that is the only 
theater where he can hope to have his plays pro- 
duced. He must understand its organization and 
its mechanism. He must study earnestly not only 
the theater itself but the actors—and, above all, 
the audiences. . 

He must go to see the successful plays of the 
season again and again, in the endeavor to dis- 
cover the causes of their success and the means 
whereby this success has been attained. The 
first time he is a spectator at the performance of 
a play he is likely to be merely a spectator—carried 
away like the rest of the audience by the story 
itself, by the interest of the plot, by the excite- 
ment of the successive episodes. When he gets 
home he will do well to analize his impressions 
and to ask himself how it was that these impres- 
sions were produced. Then he will do well to go 
again to verify this analysis and to clear up the 
points that may have been left in doubt. At 
this second visit he ought to be able to perceive a 
little more clearly the method of the author— 

35 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


the reasons, for example, why a certain interview 
is in the fourth act and not in the third; and the 
reasons why certain parts of the story are shown in 
action and certain other parts are merely nar- 
rated or otherwise explained to the audience. 
He ought to note especially how the dramatist 
has conveyed to the spectators the information 
about what has happened before the play began, 
not necessary to be shown in action and yet ab- 
solutely necessary if the actual story is to be fol- 
lowed with understanding. 

Then he may go a third time—and a fourth— 
until he has mastered the construction of the play; 
whereupon he may turn his attention from the 
play to the audience, marking when the spectators 
are fidgety and when they are swept along by the 
resistless rush of the action. When he perceives 
that some of the audience are looking at their pro- 
grams, or whispering to their neighbors, he had 
better look again at the play to discover, if he can, 
what made the interest relax at that moment. 

Nor should he neglect the failures and devote 
himself wholly to the successes. Many an inter- 
esting lesson can be derived from a failure. The 
student can at least try to ascertain why it failed. 
He can let it teach him what to avoid. He can 
watch the behavior of the scant audience; and this 
will sometimes be as illuminating as the conduct 
of the spectators at a successful play. Every 
dramatist, the mightiest as well as the less signi- 

36 


HOW TO WRITE A PLAY 


ficant—Shakspere and Moliére, no less than Sar- 
dou and Belasco—has always kept his eye on his 
audience. If he does not desire above all things 
to interest and to move and to hold the audience, 
then he has no business with playwriting. 

It is his first duty to find out what the play- 
goers of his own time and his own country enjoy, 
for that is what he will have to give them in his 
plays—even if he may be able also to give them 
something more. When he has learned this art 
he may express himself and deliver his own mes- 
sage—if he has one; but he has always to keep his 
audiences in mind and to remember that they 
have to be interested in the play, or his message 
will never reach its destination. He has to feel 
with his spectators, so that he may make them 
feel with him. This does not mean any “writing 
down to the vulgar mob”; but it does mean 
“writing broad for the people as a whole.” 

‘Hamlet,’ for example, is Shakspere’s master- 
piece, rich in poetry and lofty in philosophy; but 
it is also a very amusing play for the gallery-boy, 
who cares little either for poetry or for philosophy, 
but who is delighted by the ghost, by the-play 
within-the-play and by the duel with the poisoned 
swords. It has been asserted that if ‘Hamlet’ 
should be performed in a deaf-and-dumb asylum 
the inmates would be able to follow the story with 
interest by means of their eyes alone. A wise 
critic once declared that the skeleton of a good 

37 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


play is a pantomime. ‘Tartuffe’ for example is 
Moliére’s masterpiece, a marvelously rich por- 
trayal of human nature, and it has a panto- 
mime for its backbone. When the Comédie- 
Francaise went to London, forty years ago, Sar- 
cey picked out ‘Tartuffe’ as the one play of all 
the repertory that produced the most certain effect 
upon the English playgoers, since its story was 
so clear that it could be followed even by those 
ignorant of French. 

If the successful play of the hour happens to be 
publisht the aspirant will do well to get it and to 
compare the impression he had in the theater 
itself with that made by the printed page in the 
library. This will help to show him how much 
of the effect of a play is due to the performance— 
to the acting, to the looks and gestures, to the 
pauses and to the sense of suspense. And it will 
probably startle him to discover how little of the 
effect is due to external literary merit, to mere 
writing, to rhetoric; and how much of this effect 
is the result of the story itself, of the building up 
of the situations so that one seems to arise nat- 
urally out of another; and of the bold, sharp con- 
trast of character with character. “Fine writing” 
is nowadays at a discount; and in the theater 
action is all important. This is no new dis- 
covery, for Aristotle said it many centuries ago, 
insisting that story and construction were ab- 
solutely necessary, whereas poetry was only a 

38 


HOW TO WRITE A PLAY 


decoration or an accompaniment. A good play 
must have literary merit, of course; but it must 
be drama before it is literature. It has to suc- 
ceed on the stage or it will never be read. 

The ambitious aspirant will find advantage, 
also, in analizing contemporary publisht plays 
that he has not seen acted and in trying to guess 
at their effectiveness in the theater. Sardou once 
told a reporter how he had studied Scribe’s pieces 
in the endeavor to spy out the secrets of stage- 
craft. “I used to take a three-act play that I © 
did not know anything about. I read only the 
first act; and, after this exposition of the story 
and of the characters, | closed the book and then 
I tried to build up for myself the rest of the play 
that Scribe had erected on that foundation. 
And I was satisfied with myself only when I had, 
by a sheer exercise of logic, succeeded in con- 
structing a plot pretty close to that which | 
afterward found in the second and third acts.” 
Scribe is now a little old-fashioned; but today a 
novice would find it very suggestive if he took 
Pinero’s ‘ Mid-Channel,’ Jones’ ‘Liars,’ or Clyde 
Fitch’s ‘Girl with the Green Eyes,’ and, after 
studying the first act very carefully, tried to out- 
line the play that is the necessary conclusion. 

To say this is to emphasize the fact that the 
art of the dramatist is very like the art of the 
architect. A plot has to be built up just as a 
house is built—story after story; and no edifice 

39 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


has any chance of standing unless it has a broad 
foundation and a solid frame. What the char- 
acters say is less important than what they do, 
and still less important than what they are. After 
the steel frame is once erected there will be time 
enough to consider the decoration and to design 
the stained-glass windows. The story, the plot, 
the theme—these are the essential things. Vol- 
taire says somewhere that the success of a play 
depends on the choice of its subject. And whether 
a subject is good or not depends on the audience. 
Subjects that were excellent for Sophocles and for 
Shakspere are no longer satisfactory to modern 
spectators, who have a very different outlook on 
the world from that of the Athenians or the 
Elizabethans. The spectator today wants to 
see himself on the stage—himself and his fellows— 
the kind of folks he knows by personal experience. 
And it is only by choosing a subject of this sort 
that the novice can give his work what the late 
Augustin Daly used to call “contemporaneous 
human interest.” 

A play needs to have a theme; this theme 
must be interpreted by a story; and the story 
must be stiffened into a plot. The plot may be 
simple and straightforward, free from complica- 
tions and complexities; but it must deal with a 
struggle. It must show the clash of contending 
desires. This marks the sharp difference between 
the novel and the play. Alone in the library 

40 


HOW TO WRITE A PLAY 


we are often glad to read a novel which sets be- 
fore us merely a group of characters, revealing 
themselves by word of mouth; but in the theater, 
when we are assembled together, we are bored if 
we are not shown a definite action, a steadily 
moving story in which we can follow the strife 
of opposing forces. A novel may delight us by 
merely exhibiting human beings; but a play is 
not likely to please us unless we can sympathize 
with the effort of one of those human beings to 
attain a definite purpose. On the stage we want 
to see somebody wanting something and either 
getting it or not getting it. We want to see a 
fight, fought to the finish. 

When Mr. Gillette set out to put Sherlock 
Holmes into a play he instinctively seized upon 
the shadowy figure of Professor Moriarty, the 
astute leader of a band of criminals—a figure 
only glimpst vaguely in a far corner of one of 
the least known of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 
stories. Mr. Gillette put this figure in the fore- 
front of the play he was composing, and set him 
over against the incomparable detective, thus 
providing Sherlock Holmes with a foeman worthy 
of his steel. The resulting play was a duel of 
wits between the wrong embodied in Moriarty 
and the right personified by Sherlock Holmes. 
And a very large part of the success of the ‘Lion 
and the Mouse’ was due to the ease with which 
the audience was able to follow the bitter conten- 

41 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


tion between the heroine and the plutocrat, each 
of them knowing his own mind and each of them 
feeling justified in his own conscience. It may be 
noted, also, that the “Taming of the Shrew’ is one 
of the least intellectual of Shakspere’s plays, it is 
primarily a farce, with an abundance of violent 
fun; but it keeps the stage after three centuries 
because its story is vigorously dramatic, since it 
sets before us an unmistakable contention of op- 
posing forces, resulting in the conquest of a 
woman’s will by a man’s. 

One piece of advice to the novice can properly 
be offered by a student of stage history. Begin 
modestly. Begin by imitating the successful 
playwrights of your own time and your own coun- 
try. Be satisfied, at first, if you can succeed in 
doing only what these predecessors have done— 
even if you believe you have it in you to do better. 
Don’t try to be precocious. As Margaret Fuller 
said: “For precocity some great price is always 
demanded sooner or later in life.” The great 
dramatists have never exhibited any undue pre- 
cocity; they have always begun modestly by 
imitating. Shakspere’s earliest pieces are merely 
his juvenile attempts to write the kind of play 
that Marlowe and Kyd, Lyly and Greene had 
made popular. Moliére’s earliest plays are imita- 
tions of the improvised comedies of the Italian 
strollers. In these early efforts of Shakspere and 
Moliére it is scarcely possible to perceive even 

42 


HOW TO WRITE A PLAY 


the promise of the power to which they ultimately 
attained. Henry Arthur Jones began by writing 
comediettas and melodramas; and Sir Arthur 
Pinero made an equally unambitious beginning 
with curtain-raisers. 

The really important dramatist is, of course, 
a man who has something to say and who has 
learnt how to say it. In his immaturity he is 
not likely to have much to say of any great sig- 
nificance; and he can, therefore, concentrate his 
attention on learning how to say what little he has 
to utter. An anecdote is told of Courbet, the 
French painter, which brings out this point. 
A very ambitious young fellow came to him for 
advice, enlarging upon the lofty projects he had 
in mind. Courbet listened and then answered: 
“Go home and paint a portrait of your father.” 
The young man protested at this humble task, 
proclaiming his desire to paint great historical 
scenes. ‘“‘Exactly,’’ said Courbet, “I under- 
stand—you want to become a historical painter. 
That is why I tell you to go home and paint a 
portrait of your father.” 

This is excellent advice for beginners in every 
art. Like the aviators, they must be content to 
fly along the level ground for a little distance 
before they attempt to soar aloft into the blue 
empyrean. 


(1911.) 
43 


IT 


ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE 
DRAMA 


I 


HEN the future historian of the American 
drama comes to deal with the final years 
of the nineteenth century and the early years of 
the twentieth, he will do well to record that the 
riper development in that period was retarded by 
three untoward events,—the premature deaths 
of Clyde Fitch and William Vaughan Moody and 
the premature birth of Bronson Howard. 

Moody was a poet who was engaged in con- 
scientiously acquiring the art of the playwright 
when his career was cut short; and if he had lived 
we should have had a right to reckon on a series of 
serious plays deep in purpose and expert in crafts- 
manship—plays in which we should find a ful- 
filment of the expectations aroused by the 
promising ‘Great Divide’ and ‘Faith Healer.’ 
Clyde Fitch ran a longer course; he was far more 
prolific; and he had to his credit half-a-dozen or 
half-a-score popular successes. But there was no 
one of his plays which sustained its entire action 

44 


ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA 


on the high level he had been able to attain in 
separate scenes when he was at his best. The 
third act of the ‘Girl with the Green Eyes’ was 
a masterpiece of dramaturgic skill and of psycho- 
logic veracity, but it was followed by a fourth 
act so inept as to be beneath contempt. The 
Duke in the ‘Coronet of the Duchess’ was a 
vital character created with real insight into 
human nature, but the play itself was false in 
motive and feeble in construction. Fitch was 
honestly ambitious; and he believed to the end 
that his best work was still before him. 

As both Moody and Fitch were taken from us 
before they had achieved their full artistic ma- 
turity, we cannot even guess what ampler effort 
they might have put forth if they had been spared. 
But we can see that there was a definite loss to 
the American drama in the appearance of Bron- 
son Howard a score of years too early. He had 
an unusual endowment for dramatic authorship; 
he had the instinct for theatrical effect; he hada 
keen sense of character; he had an individual 
insight into human nature; he had an intuitive 
understanding of the fundamental principles of 
playmaking; and he had a broad outlook on life. 
But he came to maturity and he did his best work 
in a period of rapid transition,—in the years be- 
fore the artificial methods of Sardou and of Bou- 
cicault had been supplanted by the sterner sim- 
plicity of Ibsen and of the host of latter-day 

45 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


playwrights who responded to the stimulus of 
Ibsen’s masterly technic. The overt theatrical- 
ity of the playmakers of half-a-century ago has 
now fallen into disrepute, for we expect today 
to find in our more ambitious dramas a less ar- 
bitrarily arranged story, a theme of more vital 
interest, handled with a more obvious veracity. 
We demand a more serious treatment of motive 
and an ampler vision of life. 

These qualities we do not find in Bronson 
Howard’s plays, clever as they were and amusing 
as they were. We cannot help confessing that 
they seem to us compounded according to an 
outworn formula. Their merits, undeniable as 
they are, strike us now as ingeniously theatrical 
rather than truly dramatic. These pieces were 
good in their own day; but they are not good 
enough to withstand the change in our standards. 
They are unfortunately old-fashioned, even if we 
can still admire the power and the felicity with 
which certain episodes are handled, like that in 
‘Shenandoah,’ where the soldier father all un- 
wittingly conducts the funeral of his unrecognized 
son, a scene which is a little masterpiece of un- 
forced pathos. And the reason why these success- 
ful plays, the ‘Banker’s Daughter,’ “Young Mrs. 
Winthrop’ and the ‘Henrietta’ are out-of-date 
today is that they were up-to-date yesterday; 
they are what they are because their author con- 
formed to the customs of his youth. But those 

46 


ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA 


who knew Bronson Howard personally can tes- 
tify that he had it in him to write plays of a finer 
substance and of a solider truth than he was 
permitted to write in the changing epoch when he 
was at work. He was subdued to what he workt 
in; and he was born out of time. If he had come 
into this world forty years later he would have 
employed the simpler methods which are now 
acceptable; he would have dealt more sincerely 
with life; he would have been more truly dramatic 
without surrendering his theatrical effectiveness; 
he would have utilized more imaginatively his 
persistent and inquisitive observation of conduct 
and of character. 

Most successful artists work rather by instinct 
than by rule; they achieve their results more or 
less unconscious of the laws they are obeying; 
and only a very few can be trusted to analize 
their own processes and to explain why they did 
what they did in the way they did. Bronson 
Howard was one of the small minority who could 
always give a reason for the faith that was in him. 
His methods were intuitive, of course, or they 
would not have accomplisht the result at which 
he was aiming; but they were also authenticated 
by his constant reflection upon the principles of 
playwriting. After he had been guided by his 
intuition he could explain to himself the reason 
why he had done what he had done. In other 
words, he had strengthened his native instinct 

47 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


by philosophic inquiry into the unvarying prin- 
ciples of playmaking. 


II 


Tuis is a lengthy preamble to a brief anecdote. 
In the early eighties of the last century the 
Authors Club was founded in New York; and 
at its fortnightly gatherings men of letters came 
together for informal converse,—poets and play- 
wrights, novelists and essayists, historians and 
philosophers. In their several degrees they 
were all makers of books, but they regarded 
literature each from his own special angle. 
The unexpected result of this interchange of 
view was a broadening of the outlook of those 
whose vision had been too narrowly focust on 
their own field of endeavor. 

At one of these reunions I chanced to be the 
third of a group of which the other two were 
Bronson Howard and Richard Henry Stoddard, 
a poet who was inclined to take himself rather 
too seriously and who had little understanding 
of the drama. At a pause in our conversation 
Stoddard turned to Howard and put a question 
which seemed to me then, as indeed it does now, 
to be inspired by a combination of condescension 
and impertinence. 

“ Howard,” he askt, ““why don’t you sometimes 
put a little literature into your pieces?” 

48 


ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA 


The playwright was not at all disturbed by the 
unconscious discourtesy of this query. 

“That is an easy question to answer,” he re- 
plied. “I never put literature into my plays 
because I respect my art too much.” 

I doubt if Stoddard perceived the significance 
of the slight emphasis that Howard had given to 
the word put. He made no rejoinder; and our 
talk drifted to other topics. 

Stoddard’s inquiry revealed an attitude not 
uncommon among men of letters who take little 
interest in the theater and who are accustomed 
to consider the drama from the literary point of 
view. They think of a play as something in- 
tended only to be read—to be judged solely 
in the study and not also on the stage. What 
Stoddard sought in a play was “literary merit,” 
so-called, that is to say, style, rhetoric, verbal 
brilliancy; he gave little heed to the more 
necessary merits of invention and construction. 
In his eyes ‘‘fine writing’ made a fine play. It is 
because most of the poets of the English language 
took this view persistently in the nineteenth 
century that the English drama was then so sterile. 
Their attitude was not unfairly represented in 
the remark of Bayes in the ‘Rehearsal,’ when he 
inquired “What a Devil is the plot good for but 
to bring in fine things?’? And by good things 
they meant glittering similes, pointed antitheses 
and an unending effulgence of figures of speech. 

49 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


They would have had little sympathy with Jou- 
bert’s incisive declaration that “what is wanted 
is not merely the poetry of images, but the poetry 
of ideas.”” They expected the dramatist to con- 
struct his decoration, feeling dissatisfied when 
he only decorated his construction. 

The quarrel is ancient, if it is not honorable; 
and the men of letters could have pointed with 
pride to Seneca and to the Italians of the Renas- 
cence and to the French who followed in the foot- 
steps of the Italians. But they would have found 
no support in the practice or in the precepts of 
the great Greek dramatists or of the great drama- 
tists of the modern languages. The great drama- 
tists know better than anyone else that plays 
do not live by style alone, but by substance, by 
invention and by construction, by imagination 
and by veracity. A good play must be well 
written, no doubt, but before it is written it must 
be well conceived and well developt; it must 
have a theme; it must have a story which reveals 
itself in a sequence of situations; and this plot 
must be peopled with human beings who look like 
human beings, who talk like human beings, and 
who act like human beings. 

While the words by means of which these char- 
acters disclose themselves and carry on the action 
are important, they are far less important than 
the action itself. Moreover, true “literary merit” 
does not reside in the smoothness of the external 

50 


ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA 


rhetoric but in the vigorous harmony of the in- 
ternal elements which enable the play to stand 
four-square to all the winds that blow. It is by 
the force of these internal elements that a drama 
maintains itself in the theater, even if it is more 
or less by its external charm of style that it pleases 
us also in the library. In the playhouse the play 
appeals to the playgoers, an incongruous mass 
made up of all sorts and conditions of men; yet 
the verdict of this mass is always sincere and it 
has always had the high respect of the great 
dramatists, who have indeed paid little or no 
regard to any other verdict. Probably most of 
the great dramatists would unhesitatingly sub- 
scribe to the assertion of one of the most adroit 
playwrights of our own time, Mr. William Gil- 
lette, when he declared that dramatic authors find 
the public “honest and straightforward with us 
always, ever ready to be moved by what is true 
and lifelike and human, provided it be made in- 
teresting; ever ready to reject the false and arti- 
ficial, even tho it be festooned with literary gems.” 

“Festooned with literary gems!’’? Could there 
be an apter description of the “literature’’ that 
is put into a play, in the vain hope of disguising 
its falsity and its artificiality and of concealing its 
lack of truth and humanity? A dramatist who 
understands his art and respects it, never tries 
to put literature into his plays; he confines his 
effort to putting life into them, well aware that 

51 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


if he achieves sincerity and veracity, he will also 
attain literature without having strained for it. 


Ill 


THE overmastering desire to be “literary” on 
all occasions and at all costs has wrecked the hopes 
of many an ambitious man of letters when he 
has sought success on the stage. Stevenson, for 
example, believed that the artificiality of his 
‘Deacon Brodie,’ its falsity to life, could be atoned 
for by its sheer verbal beauty. He was able to 
give his story this external merit; but he neg- 
lected to give it the necessary internal merit of 
sincerity. He amused himself by playing with 
his subject, instead of wrestling with it after 
fasting and prayer. He tried to palm off on the 
public a verbal veneer as a substitute for the 
solid mahogany which the public expected. 
Clever as he was, he failed to see that a living 
drama depends upon a stark simplicity of struc- 
ture, which may admit of decoration but which 
does not demand this, because it has ever the 
undeniable beauty of perfect design, a beauty 
equally undeniable even when it is unadorned. 

Voltaire was a man of letters, beyond all ques- 
tion, but he was also a man with a wide and varied 
experience in the theater; and it was this experi- 
ence which once led him to set forth the essential 
qualities of a play: “Compact a lofty and in- 

52 


ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA 


teresting event in the space of two or three hours; 
bring forward the several characters only when 
each ought to appear; never leave the stage 
empty; develop a plot as probable as it is attrac- 
tive; say nothing unnecessary; instruct the mind 
and move the heart; be eloquent always and with 
the eloquence proper to every character repre- 
sented; use a language as pure as the most careful 
prose without permitting the fetters of rime to 
appear to interfere with the thought,—these are 
the conditions now imposed on tragedy.” And if 
we strike out the injunction never to leave the 
stage empty and the advice about rime,—moni- 
tions of value only in French tragedy—we have 
here a characteristically penetrating analysis. 
Man of letters as Voltaire was above all else, 
he did not ask the intending playwright to spend 
any of his energy on the effort to be “literary.” 
Even when he prescribed the duty of being 
“eloquent always” he qualified this and explained 
his real meaning by adding “with the eloquence 
proper to every character represented.” Plainly 
enough Voltaire was out of sympathy with the 
many poets of his own time who were wont to 
rely on “‘festoons of literary gems”’ and whose ver- 
bal glitter was often only pinchbeck and paste. 
With the same insight into the true conditions 
of dramatic composition, Voltaire, on another oc- 
casion, declared that tragedy welcomes metaphor 
and abhors simile. “Why? Because a meta- 
o3 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


phor, when it is natural, belongs to passion; 
but a simile belongs only to the intelligence.” 

When we consider the plays of Shakspere in 
the order in which he wrote them, it is interesting 
to see how he indulged freely in simile in the days 
of his apprenticeship to the art of playmaking: 
and how as he gained a firmer grasp on the 
principles of the art, he banisht simile and _ relied 
almost altogether upon metaphor. In ‘Love’s 
Labor’s Lost,’ for example, which is probably his 
earliest attempt at comedy, we can observe him 
joyfully displaying his own verbal dexterity, 
delighting in conceits and in fanciful comparisons, 
juggling with words for their own sake. Some- 
thing of this he retained even when he wrote his 
youthful tragedy ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ where we 
can catch him in the act, so to speak, of “putting 
literature into a play.” But there is nothing of 
this in the ‘Macbeth’ of his maturity; that 
achieves literature inevitably, by its simple ver- 
acity, and seemingly without overt exertion on 
his part. In ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’ we can de- 
tect his own consciousness of his cleverness, 
whereas in ‘Macbeth’ he has ceased to be clever 
and is content to be true. 

In nothing is Shakspere’s ultimate mastery of 
his craft more clearly disclosed than in the un- 
erring certainty with which he employed now 
prose and then blank verse as the varying epi- 
sodes of his story seemed to demand the one or 
theother. In‘ Julius Cesar,’ for instance, Brutus 

54 


ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA 


and Cassius and Mark Antony, the loftier figures 
of the tragedy, speak in blank verse; the less 
important characters make use of a rhythmic 
prose, effectively cadenced but lacking the rigor- 
ous restrictions of meter; the plebeians and the 
mob express their emotions and their opinions in 
bare prose. 

Most of the modern poets of our language, 
when they have essayed a five-act tragedy, have 
failed to profit by Shakspere’s example. They 
have not dared to drop into prose, even in dealing 
with the unpoetic commonplaces of everyday 
existence. They never cease to walk on stilts, 
because they are forever trying to put literature 
into their plays. ‘The ordinary English poetical 
play varies between rather slack and formless 
meter, and ornate, involved and _ ultra-poetical 
diction,’ so Professor Gilbert Murray asserts. 
“The first enables the poet to slide into prose 
when asking for his boots; the second, almost un- 
assisted, has to keep up the poetic quality of the 
atmosphere. It does so, of course, at the expense 
of directness, and often with the ruinous result 
that where you have Drama you have killed 
Poetry, and where you have Poetry you have 
killed Drama.” 


IV 


Proressor Murray has here placed his finger 
on the prevailing defect of the English poetical 
play of the middle of the nineteenth century. 

55 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


It insisted on being “poetical” at all times and at 
any cost. It was the result of a mistaken belief 
that a play could be made poetical by applying a 
varnish of “poetry.” And a belief equally mis- 
taken led the writers of English comedy of the 
same period to besprinkle their dialog with 
hand-made witticisms, with alleged epigrams, 
distributed lavishly to all the characters, even to 
the dullest and the least capable of making a 
joke. In the insubstantial comic pieces of H. J. 
Byron, anybody would say anything however 
inappropriate, to anybody else, if this could be 
made a cue for a cut-and-dried repartee. The 
spectators of these highly unreal pieces could not 
doubt that Byron kept a notebook in which he 
jotted down every joke, every quip and every 
pun that came to him; and they could almost 
see him taking out one or another of these merry 
jests to pin it into his dialog as best he could. 
“The sure sign of a general decline of an art 
is the frequent occurence, not of deformity, but 
of misplaced beauty,’ said Macaulay with his 
customary common sense. “In general, trag- 
edy is corrupted by eloquence and comedy by 
wit.” Perhaps it is rather grandiloquence than 
actual eloquence which marks the decline of 
tragedy; but that comedy is debased by a per- 
petual questing of epigram, falsely so-called, must 
be admitted at once. The disappearance of the 
factitious and laborious “wit” from our more 
56 


ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA 


recent plays is evidence that modern comedy is 
recovering its health. 

Oscar Wilde was the latest British comic drama- 
tist to indulge in incessant fireworks. But it is 
an error to suppose that his success on the stage 
was due to his scintillations and his corruscations. 
His best comedies are solidly built, with an in- 
genious story carefully elaborated into a com- 
pelling plot. The pleasure which we get from 
‘Lady Windemere’s Fan’ is only in small part de- 
rived from its varnish of witticisms, often highly 
arbitrary in themselves and sometimes very 
arbitrarily distributed. Indeed, there are already 
signs that the persistent and insistent crackle of 
the dialog is beginning to be annoying to latter- 
day audiences. We are losing our liking for an 
external dazzle which distracts our attention from 
the internal action artfully arranged to arouse 
and to retain out interest. 

Even if ‘Lady Windemere’s Fan’ is not quite 
sincere in its portrayal of character and not quite 
veracious in its dealing with life, it has an in- 
geniously articulated plot which would retain 
its potency even if the play should be translated 
into German and thence into Spanish and finally 
back into English,—an operation which would 
certainly brush off all the spangles that now glis- 
ten in the dialog. Yet we may be assured that 
these forced and fortuitous quips and quirks 
were not continuously injected because the 

57 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


author believed it to be his duty to put literature 
into his play, but rather because he recognized that 
he had to maintain his own reputation as a wit, 
as a manufacturer of cleverness, as a retailer of 
“ood things.” And it may be admitted that in 
bestowing this deliberate brilliance on his dialog, 
Wilde was dutifully following in the footsteps of 
the two masters of the English comedy of manners, 
Congreve and Sheridan. 

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century 
the French drama also suffered from an epidemic 
of epigram. The foremost French comedy of that 
time, the ‘Gendre de M. Poirier’ of Augier and 
Sandeau, was more or less infected by this mal- 
ady; and the chief rival of the ‘Gendre de M. 
Poirier, the ‘Demi-Monde’ of the younger 
Dumas, has been quarantined by later French 
critics because of its feverish eruption of witti- 
cisms. It is only fair to record that Dumas re- 
covered, and that in his later ‘Francillon’ there 
is scarcely a single example of calculated repartee. 
The dialog of ‘Francillon’® seems spontaneous 
even when it is at its cleverest, whereas that of 
the ‘Demi-Monde’ strikes us today as mannered 
and metallic. The French playwrights of the 
twentieth century may even be accused of having 
reacted a little too violently from the practices 
of their immediate predecessors, since they 
appear almost to avoid wit. 

So long as the dramatist, French, British or 

58 


ON PUTTING LITERATURE INTO THE DRAMA 


American, was adjusting his plays to the apron- 
stage which brought the actors almost into per- 
sonal contact with the audience and which 
invited the characters to be exuberantly gran- 
diloquent in tragedy or confidentially witty 
in comedy, he was subject to a constant tempta- 
tion to “put literature into the drama.” But this 
temptation has diminisht, if it has not disap- 
peared, now that our playwrights are all working 
for the picture-frame stage which keeps the 
actors far distant from the spectators and which 
therefore places a premium on simple and direct 
utterance. 


(1918.) 


IV 
THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


I 


RITICS of the drama are like the poor, in 

that they are always with us. It matters 
little whether the theater is flourishing or expir- 
ing; we are never at a loss for self-appointed 
judges, ready to pass condemnation on the prin- 
ciples and on the practices of the playwrights. 
In Alexandria when dramatic literature was non- 
existent, as the glory that was Greece was slowly 
sinking out of sight, and in Italy again when 
there was a splendid renascence of all the arts 
save the drama alone, there existed a supera- 
bundant and superfluous host of critics, promul- 
gating the rigid code which they had deduced 
from their own inner consciousness. 

Indeed, it seems to be especially in times of 
dramatic penury that the theorists of the theater 
increase and multiply spontaneously. And this 
is most unfortunate, since it is quite as bad for a 
critic as it is for a poet to let himself lose sight of 
the actual playhouse, with its associated players 
and its accustomed playgoers. The fundamental 

69 


THREE THEORISTS OF, THE THEATER 


principles of any art can be singled out and made 
plain only by observation of the practice of the 
artists who have excelled in that art. Criticism 
is but the hand-maid of creation; and the task 
of the commentator is impossible when he lacks 
material for comment. Then is he reduced to the 
needless and profitless exercise of inventing Rules 
for an art which he has not been able to observe 
in the actual process. Whenever the dramatic 
critic has toiled vainly because there was no liv- 
ing drama in his own tongue and in his own time 
to inspire him and to guide him, he has been led 
unfailingly to deal with the drama as tho it were 
solely a department of literature, to be weighed 
on literary scales only and to be measured merely 
by literary standards. 

Even when the theater is active and produc- 
tive, it is difficult enough for the critic to re- 
member always that the drama does not lie wholly 
within the limits of literature. No doubt, it is 
mainly by its literary qualities that a drama sur- 
vives, by its invention, by its structure, by its 
style, by its veracity of character, by its ethical 
integrity; but it is by its non-literary qualities 
that it has been able at first to succeed on the 
stage, by its theatrical effectiveness, its histri- 
onic opportunities, its picturesqueness when per- 
formed. 

In the long, interesting and instructive history 
of dramatic criticism—a history which has not 

61 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


yet tempted to its telling any scholar equipt with 
a wide acquaintance with literature and a deep 
understanding of the theater—in this long history 
two rmames stand out preéminent, the names of 
Aristotle and of Lessing. The names of the 
Alexandrian writers are forgotten; and the names. 
of the critics of the Italian Renascence are familiar 
only to devoted specialists. It may be ad- 
mitted that the names of Sidney and of Boileau 
are still cherisht; but the code they declared has 
long been discredited and disestablisht. The 
names of Gottsched and of La Harpe carry no 
weight in the twentieth century, even to those 
who chance to remember that once they were 
loudly acclaimed as arbiters of taste. Many a 
name that for a season blazed brilliantly in the 
sky is as disregarded today as the stick of a burnt- 
out rocket. Who pays any attention today to 
Schlegel, sunk beneath the wave of oblivion be- 
cause of the rancor of his political prejudices and 
because of the frequent falsity of his general ideas? 
Who knows now, or cares to know, that a cen- 
tury ago Népomucéne Lemercier catalogued the 
twenty-five rules which tragedy must obey and the 
twenty-two rules to which comedy must conform? 
Critics of the drama come and go; they rise and 
fall; they have their little fame, and sometimes 
they may survive to see it fade away. Reputa- 
tion is as fleeting in criticism as it is in creation; 
and the promulgators of dramatic doctrine are 
62 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


no more likely to retain popular esteem than the 
poets and the playwrights they have sought to 
guide and to govern. The winds of doctrine 
shift with the changing years, and often with 
startling suddenness. But however bitterly the 
veering breezes may blow, the names of Aristotle 
and of Lessing stand where they have stood these 
many years. 

The pleasure that we find in the selection of 
the Hundred Best Books or of the Hundred Finest 
Pictures is futile; but there is always profit in 
striving to recognize with certainty the Best 
Poets and the Best Painters, be they a dozen or 
a score or a hundred. And when we seek to get 
a firm grasp upon the abiding principles of any 
art, it is no less profitable for us to ascertain who 
are the Best Critics of that art. In the analysis 
and interpretation of the art of the drama the 
supreme chiefs are Aristotle and Lessing, these 
two and no others. They are theorists, it is true, 
as were the Alexandrians and the Italians, whose 
vogue was evanescent; but their theories were 
solidly rooted in accurate observation of the 
acted drama. The laws they declared are as 
valid today as ever; their judgments have been 
confirmed in the supreme court over which Time 
presides; and even their obiter dicta are still sig- 
nificant. 

When we seek to spy out the reasons why the 
solid authority of Aristotle and Lessing endures 

(63 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


thru the ages, we must begin by crediting both of 
them with the fourfold qualifications without 
which all efforts at criticism are barren. They 
had insight and equipment, sympathy and dis- 
interestedness. They did not possess all of these 
qualifications in an equal degree; but all four of 
these they did possess not only sufficiently but 
abundantly. They had the innate gift of analysis; 
they had material for comparison; they had a 
natural relish for the best; and they sought al- 
ways to see the thing as it is, without bias, taking 
their personal prejudices out of the way. What- 
ever deduction may be indicated from this asser- 
tion must be directed to two points only; Aristotle 
may be held to be a little limited in his equip- 
ment by the fact that he had no other dramatic 
literature to compare with that of his country- 
men; and Lessing may be thought to be more 
than a little limited in his disinterestedness by his 
desire to discredit and to destroy the influence of 
the French classicists. 

Then the ultimate validity of their criticism is 
due partly to the fact that their vision was not 
circumscribed by the walls of the playhouse; 
they toiled in other fields and they knew many 
things wholly unrelated to the theater. Their 
reputations do not rest solely, or even chiefly, on 
their work as expounders of dramaturgic doctrine. 
One might go so far as to say that altho Aristotle 
and Lessing are the supreme dramatic critics, 

64 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


their fame would scarcely be less if they had never 
written a word about the theater. No man can 
know his own subject thoroly if his own subject 
is all that he knows; he needs to wander afield 
and to be interested in many other things if he is 
to attain breadth of survey even in his own 
specialty. Aristotle, and Lessing also, had that 
cognate culture, without which, as Mr. Brownell 
has insisted, “specific erudition produces a rather 
lean result.” 

But altho their vision was not contracted within 
the limits of the theater, it is always in the theater 
itself that they conceive themselves to be sitting 
when they come to the criticism of a play. They 
are never mere readers of literature but always 
spectators of the acted drama. They are ever 
thinking in terms of the theater itself. “A play 
has this peculiarity and distinction,” said Brune- 
tiére, “that being written to be acted, it is not 
complete in itself and it cannot be detacht from 
the material conditions of scenic representation 
and from the nature of the public for which it is 
destined.” Aristotle and Lessing kept in mind 
the nature of the public to which the play- 
wrights they were discussing had appealed; and 
they never overlookt the material conditions of 
scenic representation. By a constant effort of - 
imaginative sympathy they were able to transport 
themselves in fancy from the desk where they 
sat alone to a seat in front of the actors and by 

65 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


the side of a crowd of other spectators. It is by 
their understanding of the Siamese-twinship of 
the drama and the theater that their theories are 
validated. 

The principles they establisht for dramatic 
literature were derived from the practice of suc- 
cessful playwrights. These principles had noth- 
ing etherial or volatile; they were rooted in com- 
mon sense. What Professor Giddings says about 
Aristotle as an interpreter of the science of govern- 
ment is equally true about Aristotle as an ex- 
pounder of the art of poetry: “Aristotle was in- 
deed one of the greatest of theorists; but he is 
likewise one of the shrewdest judges of what we 
call practical politics”; and “his theories grew 
out of his observations, and they formulate vital 
principles from concrete social conditions.” And 
Lessing was scarcely less shrewd than Aristotle 
as a judge of practical playmaking, having even 
the advantage of being himself a successful play- 
wright, practising what he preacht. | 

In other words, the dramatic criticism of Aris- 
totle and Lessing is expert criticism; and it is 
highly technical. As the technical principles of 
every art endure thru the ages unchanged, how- 
ever much its devices may be modified by altered 
conditions, the precepts proposed by Aristotle and 
by Lessing state permanent and essential prin- 
ciples of dramaturgy. Indeed, it is the insistence 
of Aristotle upon sheer technic which has misled. 

66 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


so many of his commentators, who have accepted 
him as an inspired lawgiver, coming down from 
the mountain with the tables of stone in his hand, 
instead of seeing that he is only presenting shrewd 
deductions from his own observations in the 
theater when the masterpieces of the Greek drama 
were performed before his gaze. 


II 


IN its size, in its material conditions, in its spec- 
tators, the Globe theater in London was very 
unlike the theater of Dionysus in Athens; the 
picture-frame stage of our latter-day playhouse 
is very unlike the platform-stage of the Eliza- 
bethans; but none the less are the essential prin- 
ciples which guided Shakspere in his greatest 
tragedies, when his ambition was aroused and 
when he was exerting all his powers, the same as 
those which governed Sophocles and which 
Aristotle declared,—as they are the same which 
Moliére followed in his turn and which Ibsen was 
to obey in our own time. These essential prin- 
ciples are independent of the changes in the size 
and material conditions of the various theaters 
that have succeeded one another in the past 
twenty-five centuries. It is because Aristotle was 
able to lay hold of the most important of these 
principles more than two thousand years ago 
that he remains constantly up-to-date, with no 


67 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


danger of ever falling out-of-date. This is the 
reason why his name is now constantly invoked 
by the more important reviewers of the con- 
temporary drama, while the names of Johnson and 
Pope, of Boileau and Horace are allowed to lan- 
guish in innocuous desuetude. 

This modernness of Aristotle’s dramatic theories 
is due mainly to his modesty in not assuming the 
attitude of the inspired lawgiver. He was never 
arrogant, as Schlegel was. He contented himself 
with pointing out the principles which seemed to 
him to underly the practices of the dramatic poets 
of accredited supremacy. He suggested that if 
Sophocles apparently obeys certain rules, why, 
then it might be well if all those who may be am- 
bitious to compose plays should also obey these 
rules. He conceived himself as giving counsel, 
and as advising ’prentice playwrights how best 
they could model themselves on the masters. 
His conclusions were tentative, as becomes a man 
of science, conscious that the results of any in- 
quiry are never final. 

It need not surprize us that the uneasy Italian 
commentators of Aristotle did not see him in 
this light, that they ascribed to him their own dic- 
tatorial attitude. They knew Seneca better 
than they knew Sophocles; and they really relisht 
the declamatory rhetoric of the Hispano-Roman 
more than the austere poetry and the masterly 
plotting of the great Greek. They knew Horace 

68 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


better than they knew Aristotle—Horace, who in 
all his life may never have seen a good play well 
acted, and whose precepts are detacht from prac- 
tize, being borrowed second-hand from the 
Alexandrian criticasters of the Hellenistic de- 
cadence. Perhaps it is not too much to say that 
the supersubtle Italians read Aristotle thru the 
spectacles of Horace; and because Horace spoke 
as one having authority, they believed that 
Aristotle also was a promulgator of implacable 
decrees. When they failed to find in his text 
a code as complete or as rigid as they desired, in 
their intolerance they did not hesitate to draft 
new laws in the name of Aristotle. They sancti- 
fied the elaborate classicist doctrine of the drama 
by sheltering it under his revered authority. It 
is no wonder that when the romanticist revolt 
came, as it had to come, some of its leaders should 
have sneered at Aristotle, holding him responsible 
for the perverted theories put forth by his insati- 
able commentators. Nor is there any wonder 
that Aristotle should have come into his own 
again, after the “magniloquent silhouettes of 
romanticist drama,’—as Mr. Huneker has called 
them—shrivelled from the stage. 

Aristotle’s discussion of playmaking is inci- 
dental to his larger discussion of poetry. It has 
come down to us incomplete and fragmentary. 
We cannot be assured that we have his own text. 
We are in doubt whether what we now possess is 

69 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


only a portion of a careful treatise made ready 
for publication by Aristotle, or whether it 1s 
only a collection of memorandums set down loosely 
to aid him in lecturing. There are even com- 
mentators who hold that our manuscripts are due 
not to Aristotle himself but to some ardent dis- 
ciple who took notes to preserve as best he could 
the utterances of the master. The late Jules 
Lemaitre was of the second of these opinions, 
finding confirmation for it in the famous sentence 
about the tragic “purgation” of passion. “No 
doubt Aristotle jotted this down as a simple 
memorandum,—for it is incomplete and badly 
constructed, containing a figure of speech both bi- 
zarre and ill-prepared; and it is very like those 
notes, intelligible only to ourselves which we set 
down in a notebook with telegraphic or hiero- 
glyphic brevity.” 

In the same criticism,—an account of Cor- 
neille’s vain efforts to reconcile his own practice 
with the precepts of Aristotle——Lemaitre dwelt 
on the patent absurdity of supposing that all 
the precepts of Aristotle are final for all time and 
in all countries, since the Greek philosopher was 
making remarks only about the tragedies of his 
own day,—‘“that is to say, about operas of a 
kind, which were acted and sung two or three 
times a year at great festivals,’ and of which 
Aristotle “might have seen or read a hundred at 
most, for they were not very numerous,” probably 

70 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


outlining “his theories from his study of a score of 
prize-winning plays.” 

It is not to be wondered at that a few of Aris- 
totle’s remarks are applicable only to Greek 
tragedies,—“‘ operas of a kind’ ;—what is wonder- 
ful is that so many of them are acceptable when 
applied to modern plays wholly unlike Greek trag- 
edies, and that a critic as acute as Emile Faguet 
was not guilty of wilful paradox when he asserted 
that the more he studied the ‘ Poetics’ the more 
assured he felt that Aristotle “has given us rather 
the theory of French tragedy than that of Greek 
tragedy.” 

What are the principles of playmaking declared 
by Aristotle and as dominant today as they were 
in his own timer First of all, there is a clear 
recognition of the essential relation of the drama 
to the theater, with its declamation, its gestures, 
its spectacle, and above all, with its spectators 
whom the playwright has to interest, to arouse, 
and to hold. 

Secondly, there is an equally clear recognition 
of the supreme importance of the action, the 
story, the plot;—“most important of all is the 
structure of the incidents, for a play is an imita- 
tion, not of men, but of an action and of life,— 
of happiness and misery; and happiness and 
misery consist in action, the end of human life 
being a mode of action, not a quality.... 
Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to 

7 A | 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


the representation of character; character comes 
in as subsidiary to the action. Hence the inci- 
dents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and 
the end is the chief thing of all. Again, without 
action there cannot be a tragedy; there may 
be without character... . The poet should bea 
maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is 
a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates 
are actions.” 

This is a hard saying for the defenders of the 
closet-drama, for it implies that merely as a play 
the ‘Two Orphans’ is superior to the ‘ Blot in the 
*Scutcheon,’ yet this would be denied by no com- 
petent dramatic critic. Jules Lemaitre called 
attention to the accuracy of Aristotle’s clear 
distinctions and pointed out that modern melo- 
drama makes use of general types, often tradi- 
tional and empty of veracity; and that plays with 
no atom of observation or of truth may move us 
on the stage by virtue of their situations alone, 
of their emotional appeal. ‘The object of the 
theater is to represent a man acting, and therefore 
to exhibit him to us not as he is himself, but as 
he bears himself in his relations with other men 
and under the influence of accidental circum- 
stances. Now, if the playwright is also an ob- 
server and a psychologist, if he is capable of letting 
us pierce to the core of a character, of an original 
soul, in the brief moment when this soul is react- 
ing against an external accident, evidently the 

72 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


result will be more valuable. Yet altho this 
merit is a welcome addition, it is not indispensable 
in the theater. In short, the drama interests us, 
not predominantly by the depicting of human 
nature, but primarily by situations and only 
secondarily by the feelings of those therein in- 
volved.” 

Thirdly, a play must have unity of purpose. 

“Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is 
complete and whole and of a certain magnitude. 

A whole is that which has.a beginning, a 
middle and an end.... A well constructed 
plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at 
haphazard. ... Of all plots and actions the 
episodic are the worst; I call a plot epzsodic in 
which the episodes or acts succeed one another 
without probable or necessary sequence.” 

Fourthly, the story of a play must be plausible. 
“It is not the function of the poet to relate what 
has happened but what may happen,—what is 
possible according to the law of probability or 
necessity.” 

Fifthly, the playwright must never forget the 
playhouseand must always seek to foresee the effect 
to be produced when his play is actually per- 
formed. “In constructing the plot and working 
it out with the help of language, the poet should 
place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. 
In this way, seeing everything with the utmost 
vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, 

73 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


he will discover what is in keeping with it and will 
be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.” 

Sixthly, the tragic poet must avoid both the 
commonplace and the magniloquent :—“ The per- 
fection of style is to be clear without being mean.” 

Here are a few of the most significant of Aris- 
totle’s suggestions to intending dramatists; they 
are simple enough all of them, and obvious enough, 
not to say indisputable. Yet they are sufficient 
to justify the assertion of Professor Bywater that 
when Aristotle was engaged only in showing how 
to construct a play in accord with the material 
conditions of the Athenian theater, he succeeded 
also “in formulating once for all the great first 
principles of dramatic art, the canons of dramatic 
logic, which even the most adventurous of 
modern dramatists can only at his peril forget 
or set at naught.” 


Ill 


THE modern appreciation of Aristotle dates 
from Lessing, for it was the German critic who 
brusht aside the swarm of commentators to 
scrutinize the actual text of Aristotle and to see 
for himself what the Greek had actually said and 
what he actually meant. Lessing it was who 
made the pregnant suggestion that if we seek a 
full understanding of the ‘Poetics’ we must 
consider that truncated treatise in connection 
with Aristotle’s better preserved ‘Rhetoric’ and 

74 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


‘Ethics.’ We may hail Lessing, even tho he was 
greatly stimulated by Dacier and by Diderot, as 
the real leader of the movement to repeal the clas- 
sicist code of the drama, erected mainly upon mis- 
understanding and misinterpretation of Aristotle. 

Perhaps Lessing suffers today from the com- 
plete success of his polemic against the French 
critics who had adopted the windspun and wire- 
drawn theories of the Italians. In his day and in 
his country, it was generally believed that French 
tragedy was a revival of Greek tragedy and 
possibly even an improvement upon it. Now- 
adays we see so clearly that there was no basis for 
this belief that we find it difficult to understand 
how anybody could ever have held it; and there- 
fore we are inclined to wonder why Lessing was 
So persistent in his demonstration of its absurdity. 
This is the inevitable disadvantage of all triumph- 
ant polemic, for when the victory is once won 
we fail to perceive the necessity for killing the 
dead over and over again. 

Lessing was never overawed by the authority of 
Aristotle; but he insisted, first of all, on being 
shown the Greek’s own words. He permitted 
no predecessor to hold him in pupillage, preferring 
to do his own thinking in his own fashion. He 
denied the jurisdiction of the French and the 
Italian and the Latin critics, tamely accepted 
by his contemporaries in Germany. He _ took 
nothing for granted; and he insisted on going 

795 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


back to first principles. He analized the judg- 
ments of those who have gone before; and he 
accepted their verdicts only when he _ himself 
found the decision in accord with the facts. 
French criticism of the acted drama from the 
Abbé d’Aubignac to Népomucéne Lemercier is 
not so foolish as those who have never read it 
may be inclined to suppose. The classicist code 
is hard and narrow, and it imposes upon its in- 
terpreters not a few absurdities; but these inter- 
preters make shrewd suggestions here and there. 
Marmontel’s advice to aspiring playwrights is 
rich in sensible remarks; but where Marmontel 
only scratcht the surface, Lessing cut to the core. 
Lemercier’s twenty-five rules for tragedy and his 
twenty-two rules for comedy, altho pedantically 
promulgated, are most of them acceptable enough; 
but Lessing did not descend to externalities like 
these, being moved always to ascertain the inner 
qualities which alone vitalize a work of art. 
Diderot, from whom Lessing borrowed a great 
deal—combating French influence with arms 
captured from a Frenchman—was fertile in sug- 
gestive ideas, but he was rarely trustworthy; and 
the author of the ‘Laocoén’ was ever a sounder 
critic of art than the author of the ‘ Paradox on the 
Comedian.” The German never let himself be 
led astray by his own theories, and he achieved a 
consistency denied to the gifted but irregular 
Frenchman, partly because his equipment was 
76 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


more solid and partly because his insight was 
more penetrating. 

Méziéres, in his preface to the French transla- 
tion of the ‘Hamburg Dramaturgy,’ had no diffi- 
culty in showing the extent of Lessing’s in- 
debtedness to Diderot and also in exhibiting 
Lessing’s occasionally eratic opinions. Méziéres 
pointed out that Lessing allowed himself the 
astounding liberty of calling the comedy of Des- 
touches finer than the comedy of Moliére, and of 
vaunting his own ability to rehandle the themes of 
Corneille and Racine more effectively than they 
had done. It is true that Lessing was not only a 
critic of the drama but also a creator of it, and that 
his own pieces are the earliest of German plays to 
establish themselves in the theater and to keep the 
stage after a century and a half. But this does 
not justify his airy assertion that he could surpass 
Corneille and Racine in their own field. 

The explanation of his uncharacteristic boast 
is to be found in the fact that Lessing was fighting 
Voltaire, and that he was thus tempted to dis- 
parage Corneille and Racine, in whose footsteps 
Voltaire was following. The German critic-creator 
wisht to explode the belief of his countrymen in 
the infallibility of French criticism and in the 
indisputable superiority of French tragedy. In 
the ardor of battle he was not always so par- 
ticular as he might be in the choice of weapons 
he snatcht up for attack and defense. As Lowell 

77 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


pointed out, Lessing’s intellect “was commonly 
stirred to motion by the impulse of other minds, 
and struck out its brightest flashes by collision 
with them.” It must be remembered also that 
Lessing’s discussion of dramatic art is not a treat- 
ise like Aristotle’s, written out at leisure after 
full premeditation; it is a journalistic job, com- 
posed as occasion served; its successive chap- 
ters, if they may be so called, are evoked by the 
particular plays which chanced to be produced 
at the Hamburg theater. Very few of these 
plays are known today, even by name, except to 
readers of the ‘Dramaturgy.’ It is testimony 
to Lessing’s critical faculty that he could find 
a suggestive text for shrewd comment in preten- 
tious German pieces and in artless German adap- 
tations from contemporary French drama. As 
subject matter for discussion, Lessing lackt 
precisely what Aristotle had,—a living dramatic 
literature in his own language. Nor had he been 
privileged to behold on the stage any of the 
masterpieces of Shakspere and Calderon with 
which he had acquainted himself in the study. 
Where Aristotle had a body of doctrine clearly 
and completely thought out before he began on 
his book, Lessing had to extemporize his opinions 
from day to day during his single year of service as 
theatrical reviewer. There need be no wonder 
that the ‘Hamburg Dramaturgy’ is not com- 
pact; and the real cause for surprize is that the 
78 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


collected articles are as coherent and as consistent 
as they are. Nor is there any necessity to deny 
that some of these articles reveal themselves now 
as mere journalism, sufficient unto the day but 
lacking in permanence, or that Lessing does not 
hesitate now and again to avail himself of the 
privileges of the journalist,—to reiterate, to ex- 
aggerate even if need be, to emphasize his asser- 
tions by overstatement so as to force his casual 
readers to apprehend his meaning. That there 
are dry places here and there is due to the aridity 
of the plays he had perforce to deal with. This 
was unfortunate for Lessing, who seems to have 
wearied of his hortatory task before the year 
of his servitude was out; and it was also un- 
fortunate for us since the finer the work of art 
to be criticized the more strenuous is likely 
to be the effort of the critic to appreciate it 
worthily. 

Even if the year’s work which makes up the 
‘Hamburg Dramaturgy’ must be described as 
journalism, still bearing the traces of its news- 
paper origin, we cannot but recognize in Lessing 
an incomparable journalist, without peer in in- 
sight and in equipment, abundant in sympathy 
for what is best,—altho a little lacking in disin- 
terestedness so far as the French are concerned. 
And for journalism his style was exactly adapted. 
He was so clear, so sharp-sighted, so plain-spoken, 
so sturdy in common sense that he frequently 

79 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


appeared to be witty, altho his wit was rarely 
verbal or merely wit for its own sake. It never 
had the flashing felicity of Voltaire’s style—of 
that Voltaire whom Lessing admired even while 
attacking. It was from Voltaire that Lessing 
borrowed the useful device of using narrative 
as an implicit criticism of the plot under con- 
sideration. And we may apply to Lessing the 
praise Lord Morley bestowed on Voltaire, that 
his “‘work, from first to last, was alert with un- 
quenchable life. Some of it, much of it, has 
ceased to be alive for us now.... Yet we 
recognize that none of it was ever the dreary still- 
birth of a mind of hearsays. There is no mechani- 
cal transmission of untested bits of current 
coin.” 

Yet few of Lessing’s precepts of playmaking, 
rooted as they are in common sense and instantly 
acceptable by all students of the stage, can be 
detacht from the criticism of the specific pieces 
that evoked them. He restated principles laid 
down by Aristotle; he clarified pregnant sayings 
of Diderot; he may have derived from d’Aubignac 
the belief that unflinching fidelity to the acci- 
dental facts of history is not to be demanded 
from the writer of a historical play,—altho he may 
have found this implicit in one of Aristotle’s 
paragraphs. He was forever going back to the 
great Greek and he was incessant in declaring 
that, after all, Aristotle was not a Frenchman. 

80 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


He was quite as insistent in tackling Voltaire 
and in asserting that after all the great French- 
man was not a Greek. He spent half-a-hundred 
pages to prove that Voltaire had taken his ‘Mérope’ 
from Maffei and had failed to better it in the bor- 
rowing. And he was sometimes more negative than 
affirmative, more anxious to discredit the French 
critics and to disestablish the classicist theorists 
than to declare his own sounder and saner prin- 
ciples. 


IV 


ARISTOTLE and Lessing are the two foremost 
theorists of the theater; and there is no third 
to be rankt with them. Yet at an interval after 
them and far in advance of any fourth claimant, 
comes Francisque Sarcey, inferior to both in 
insight and equipment, even if not inferior in 
sympathy and disinterestedness. He was a 
journalist like Lessing; but he did not confine his 
activity to a single year, continuing it in fact for 
nearly two score years. He resembled Lessing 
again in that he did not begin with a body of 
doctrine, with a code of laws formulated in ad- 
vance of any possible application. Like the 
English judges he developt the law slowly from 
the successive cases that were brought before him, 
until at the last he arrived at a consciousness of 
the fundamental principles of the art he loved 
devotedly his whole life long. 

8I 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Sarcey’s body of doctrine, when once he was in 
possession of it, was his own; it was the result of 
his incomparable experience of the theater and of 
his incessant study of the spectators. As a con- 
sequence of his integrity and of his critical 
shrewdness, his doctrine is substantially identical 
with Aristotle’s and with Lessing’s. Indepen- 
dently he arrived at the same conclusions that 
they had reacht before him. As he told me 
once, whenever he took down the French transla- 
tion of the ‘Hamburg Dramaturgy’ and found 
that Lessing had anticipated him in one of his 
own discoveries, he rejoiced, feeling thereby rein- 
forced in his conviction that his discovery was 
solidly based on truth. 

Sarcey was more narrowly a man of the theater 
than either Aristotle or Lessing; and this is per- 
haps a main reason why he does not deserve to 
be placed by their side. It is true that he had 
many outside interests and that he was an inde- 
fatigable writer on all sorts of topics, literary and 
social and political; but his heart was ever in the 
theater, and to him the art of the drama had a 
supreme importance which it had not to Lessing 
or to Aristotle, because they had a broader outlook 
than he, a more comprehensive philosophy. 

Yet whatever his limitations, he was the most 
inspiring and suggestive critic of the acted drama 
in the nineteenth century. Not so dogmatic as 
Brunetiére, not so brilliant as Lemaitre, not 

82 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


so versatile as Faguet, he easily surpast 
all three in his intimacy with the playhouse and 
with its people, actors as well as authors; and he 
was therefore a sounder critic of that part of the 
drama which is more specifically of the theater. 
His experience was far longer than Lessing’s and 
his subject matter is richer and more varied. 
Where Aristotle had the Greek drama as his sole 
material for the deduction of his principles and 
where Lessing had only the plays which happened 
to be acted in a single German theater in a single 
year, even tho he ranged at will in search of 
parallels thruout dramatic literature, Sarcey had 
all the theaters of the capital of France for forty 
years when they were representing not only the 
contemporary and the classic drama in his own 
tongue but also many of the masterpieces of the 
drama in other literatures, ancient and modern. 

It may be admitted that Sarcey did not profit 
as he might by his opportunity to see on the stage 
the mightiest plays of Greece and England. He 
was too fundamentally a man of his own coun- 
try, and even of his own time, really to relish 
Sophocles and Shakspere. Moreover, he was a 
little inclined to be the slave of his own doctrine 
and to hold this a little too narrowly. He was 
only following the wise Aristotle and the shrewd 
Lessing when he insisted on the superior impor- 
tance of plot, of story, of action; but he went 
ahead of them in his appreciation of the mechan- 

83 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


ical dexterity of plotmaking. In fact, he was in- 
clined almost to accept skill in craftsmanship, the 
skill of a Scribe, for example, as the final word in 
dramatic accomplishment, instead of seeing clearly 
that this skill is only the first word. Construc- 
tion, the adroit building up of a series of situa- 
tions—this is a prime requisite of dramatic 
art, without which the art cannot exist; but it is 
only the beginning and it can never be an end in 
itself, as it was in the so-called “well-made play” 
of Scribe and of the cloud of collaborators and 
disciples that encompast Scribe about. 

Still it must be urged that in insisting upon the 
duty of providing every play with an inner skele- 
ton strong enough to support it unaided, even if 
he insisted at times a little too exclusively upon 
this, Sarcey was exerting a most wholesome in- 
fluence, especially in these days when the novelists 
are invading the theater and when some of them 
seek to confuse the essential differences between 
the art of the drama and the art of prose-fiction. 
The first and foremost of these differences is due 
to the immitigable fact that the novel may appeal 
only to the individual reader whereas the play 
must appeal to a crowd of spectators. The 
theater is “‘a function of the crowd,” so a British 
critic has declared; and in so declaring he was 
only echoing Sarcey, who asserted that he could 
deduce all the laws of dramatic art from the single 
fact that every play implies the presence of an 

84 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


audience. This is why Sarcey was so indefatiga- 
ble in his observation of the playgoers and in his 
analysis of their characteristics, their predilec- 
tions, their prejudices, their unconscious prefer- 
ences. Here he was doing explicitly what Aristotle 
and Lessing had done implicitly. 

Sarcey’s attitude when he set himself down at 
the first performance of a new play was very like 
that of the burgher of Paris who ventured to take 
a hand in the exacerbated discussion evoked by 
Corneille’s ‘Cid.’ “I have never read Aristotle 
and I know nothing about the Rules, but | 
decide upon the merit of a play in proportion to 
the pleasure I receive.’’ Sarcey had read Aris- 
totle and he was familiar with the Rules; but he 
judged tragedy and comedy, problem-play and 
farce, in proportion to the pleasure he himself 
received, but also and more particularly in pro- 
portion to the pleasure received by his fellow spec- 
tators. He came in time to be very expert in 
interpreting these unconscious preferences of the 
crowd, which the dramatist has always to reckon 
with. 

His suggestive theory of the scenes inher- 
ent in every story, which demand to be shown 
in action, the famous theory of the scénes a faire, 
Obligatory Scenes, was the result of his ability 
to translate the dumb disappointment of the 
playgoers when the dramatist neglects to set be- 
fore their eyes the interesting episode he has led 

85 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


them to expect. This is one of Sarcey’s most 
important contributions to the theory of the 
theater; and it is his own, altho there are inti- 
mations of it in earlier writers—notably in Cor- 
neille’s third ‘Discourse on the Dramatic Poem.’ 
Sarcey may have had predecessors also in his 
theory of the necessary conventions of the drama. 
Every art can exist only by its departure from the 
facts of life; the painter and the sculptor, for ex- 
ample, are permitted to represent men as motion- 
less, altho absolute absence of movement is im- 
possible to human beings. The drama demands 
the condensation and heightening of the dialog 
and the suppression of everything accidental, 
altho accident surrounds us on all sides. These 
liberties with life are for the benefit of the specta- 
tors in the theater, who want to see and to hear 
and have their interest focust upon the essentials 
of the story set before them on the stage; and by 
convention, that is by tacit agreement, by im- 
plied contract, the spectators gladly permit the 
playwright to depart from the facts of life so that 
he can delight them with the truth of life. 

It is greatly to be regretted that Sarcey never 
composed his promised ‘History of Dramatic 
Conventions’; but as he once said to me, “If | 
had ever written my book, with what could | fill 
my weekly articles?’? Here he spoke out in 
accord with his frank and sturdy common sense— 
that common sense which according to Vauyenar- 

86 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


gues must be credited rather to character than to 
intellect. | 

The influence of Lessing on the contemporary 
German theater was due not so much to his dra- 
matic criticism as to his dramatic creation,—to the 
three or four plays in which he proved that it was 
possible to put German life and German character 
on the stage at once effectively and sincerely. 
Sarcey may have written a trifling farce or two in 
his youth, but his influence on the contemporary 
French theater was due wholly to his criticism. 
He had the good fortune, denied to Lessing, of 
working in a period when there was a living dra- 
matic literature in his own language. He was 
able to interpret and to encourage Augier and 
Dumas fils, Meilhac and Halévy, Labiche and 
Rostand, very much as Boileau had interpreted 
and encouraged Moliére. The principles of play- 
making these dramatists were applying were pre- 
cisely those which Sarcey was proclaiming. 

It is difficult to overestimate the influence ex- 
erted by Sarcey upon the development of the 
drama in France in the final third of the nine- 
teenth century. His theories of the theater were 
adopted and disseminated by other critics, often 
by writers as different as Brunetiére, Lemaitre 
and Faguet. In the main, and for years, this 
influence was helpful; yet a time came at last 
when Sarcey’s principles, as he himself continued 
to declare them, were felt to be a little too narrow 


87 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


and a little too rigidly insisted upon. M. Gus- 
tave Lanson, for example, has denounced Sarcey 
for unduly confining his attention to technic, for 
overvaluing the form of a play at the expense of 
its content, and for following rather than guiding 
the taste of the public. There is a certain jus- 
tice in these charges; and it may be admitted that 
in his old age Sarcey was a willing prisoner in his 
own code of the drama. But to grant this is not 
to deny the abiding utility of his contributions to 
the theory of the theater. 


V 


At bottom the body of doctrine which Sarcey 
built up for his own use as a critic of the acted 
drama is substantially the same as that which 
we find in Lessing and in Aristotle. These three 
theorists of the theater estimate plays primarily 
by the test of the playhouse and by analysis of 
the desires of the playgoers. The several play- 
houses in which the Greek and the German and 
the Frenchman took their seats varied widely in 
their physical conditions, in their dimensions and 
in their shapes. But these various playhouses 
had one characteristic in common, a characteristic 
which is to be discovered in almost every kind 
of theater before the final quarter of the nine- 
teenth century. Inall these playhouses, the actor 
was surrounded on three sides by the audience. 

88 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


In the Attic theater the performers stood in the 
orchestra which curved into the hillside of the 
Acropolis; in Shakspere’s theater, as in Moliére’s, 
certain spectators were accommodated with seats 
on the stage itself; and in the theaters for which 
Beaumarchais and Sheridan composed _ their 
comedies the stage jutted out far into the house, 
so that the actors actually turned their backs 
on a certain proportion of the audience. But in 
the final quarter of the nineteenth century this 
platform-stage gave way to the picture-frame 
stage to which we are accustomed in our snug 
modern theaters; and nowadays the actor is not 
in close proximity to the spectators; he is not 
surrounded by them on three sides; he is with- 
drawn behind a picture-frame; and he is bidden 
not to get out of the picture. 

This change from the platform-stage of the past 
to the picture-frame stage of the present is per- 
haps the most important which has ever taken 
place in all the long history of the drama; and it 
is too recent for us to forecast all its consequences, 
altho we may be certain that they will be many 
and striking, influencing the method of every 
writer for the stage. As the dramatist always 
plans his plays with the intent and the desire of 
seeing them performed before an audience, by 
actors, and in a theater, any change in the con- 
ditions of the theater will force changes in the 
method of both actors and dramatist, and it 

89 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


may also bring about changes in the unconscious 
preferences of the audience. It is an interesting 
question whether these changes will or will not 
invalidate in any way the accredited theory of 
the theater as this has been expounded by Les- 
sing and Aristotle, who had no other plays as a 
basis of study than those composed in accord 
with the conditions of the platform-stage; and 
even Sarcey could see only the beginnings of the 
more modern drama composed specifically for the 
picture-frame stage. 

The audiences of the past who knew only the 
platform-stage, expected to see thereon a story, 
with a well-knit plot, setting forth a clash of con- 
tending desires. Will the spectators of the future, 
sitting in front of the picture-frame stage, retain 
this expectation? Or will they be contented with 
pictures of life and character held together by a 
slacker thread of story, scarcely strong enough 
to be called a plot, and lacking in any clearly 
defined conflict of volition? More than twenty 
years ago, William Archer, that acutest of 
British dramatic critics, posed this question 
clearly: “What is the essential element of 
dramar Is it the telling of a story after a cer- 
tain establisht method which has been found by 
long experience to answer to the mental require- 
ments of an average audience? Or is it the mere 
scenic presentment of passages from real life? 
Should the dramatist look primarily to action, 

go 


THREE THEORISTS OF THE THEATER 


letting character take its chancer Or primarily 
to character, letting action look after itself ?’’ 

Mr. Archer exprest his own sympathy with the 
latter opinion, holding that it was supplanting 
the former, which he admitted to have been domi- 
nant for fifty years and which he identified with 
Sarcey. But he might have identified it with 
Aristotle and admitted that it had been dominant 
for two thousand years. Nothing could be clearer 
or more emphatic than the declaration earlier 
quoted from Aristotle that if you string together 
a set of speeches expressive of character, and well 
finisht in point of diction and thought, “you will 
not produce the essential dramatic effect nearly 
so well as with a play, which, however deficient 
in these aspects yet has a plot and artistically 
constructed incidents.” To this Mr. Archer 
might answer that when Aristotle and Sarcey in- 
sisted on the superior value of plot over char- 
acter in arousing and retaining the interest of 
the average audience, they could not foresee that 
the spectators of the future in front of a picture- 
frame stage might not have precisely the same 
unconscious preferences as the spectators of the 
past almost surrounding the platform-stage— 
especially after these spectators may have had 
their interest focust on character, rather than on 
story, by the works of the many realists who have 
trod the trail blazed by Balzac. 

And to this retort, the rejoinder is easy,—in- 

vi 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


deed, Mr. Archer may despise it as a little too 
easy. Admitting that the change in the playhouse 
may bring about an unforeseen change in the at- 
titude of the more highly cultivated playgoers, 
still it is a little unlikely that the theories of the 
theater which we find expounded by Aristotle first, 
then by Lessing, and lastly by Sarcey, will turn 
out to be any less valid in the next century than 
they have proved themselves to be in the past 
twenty centuries. This much at least I may 
venture to predict without assuming the robe of 
a prophet—an unbecoming costume which | 
shall not dare to don so long as I recall George 
Eliot’s assertion, that “of all the forms of human 
error prophecy is the most gratuitous.” 


(1915.) 


V 
IF SHAKSPERE SHOULD COME BACKepe# 


NGENIOUS wits have often amused themselves 
by imagining the possible return of a departed 
genius that he might mingle for a few hours with 
men of the present generation; and they have 
humorously speculated upon his emotions when he 
found himself once again in the life he had left 
centuries earlier. They have wondered what he 
would think about this world of ours today, the 
same as his of long ago and yet not the same. 
What would he miss that he might have expected 
to find? What would he find that he could never 
have expected? As he had been a human being 
when he was in the flesh, it is a safe guess that he 
would be interested first of all in himself, in the 
fate of his reputation, in the opinion in which he 
is now held by us who know him only thru his 
writings. And it is sad to think that many a 
genius would be grievously disappointed at the 
shrinkage of his fame. If he had hoped to see 
his books still alive, passing from hand to hand, 


*This paper was written especially for ‘A Book of 
Homage to Shakspere.’ (Oxford University Press, 1916.) 


93 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


familiar on the lips as household words, he might 
be shockt to discover that they survived solely 
in the silent obscurity of a complete edition, 
elaborately annotated and preserved on an upper 
shelf for external use only. On the other hand, 
there would be a genius now and then who had 
died without any real recognition of his immortal 
gifts and who, on his imagined return to earth, 
would be delighted to discover that he now 
bulkt bigger than he had ever dared to dream. 

It is in this second and scanty group that Shak- 
spere would belong. So far as we can judge from 
the sparse records of his life and from his own 
writings, he was modest and unassuming, never 
vaunting himself, never boasting and probably 
never puffed up by the belief that he had any 
reason to boast. What he had done was all in 
the day’s work, a satisfaction to him as a crafts- 
man when he saw that he had turned out a good 
job, but a keener satisfaction to him as a man 
of affairs that he was thereby getting on and 
laying by against the day when he might retire 
to Stratford to live the life of an English gentle- 
man. Probably no other genius could now revisit 
the earth who would be more completely or more 
honestly astonisht by the effulgence of his fame. 
To suppose that this would not be exquisitely 
gratifying to him would be to suggest that he was 
not human. Yet a chief component of his broad 
humanity was his sense of humor; as a man he 

94 


IF SHAKSPERE SHOULD COME BACK? 


did not take himself too seriously, and as a ghost 
he would certainly smile at the ultra-seriousness 
of his eulogists and interpreters. A natural 
curiosity might lead him to look over a volume or 
two in the huge library of Shaksperian criticism; 
but these things would not detain him long 
Being modest and unassuming still, he would soon 
weary of protracted praise. 

It may be that Shakspere would linger long 
enough over his critics and his commentators to 
note that they have belauded him abundantly and 
superabundantly as a poet, as a philosopher, as 
a psychologist and as a playwright. He might 
even be puzzled by this fourfold classification of 
his gifts, failing for the moment to perceive its 
precision. When he read praise of his poetry, 
he would naturally expect to see it supported by 
quotation from his two narrative poems or from 
his one sonnet-sequence. Quite possibly he might 
be somewhat annoyed to observe that these 
juvenile verses, cordially received on their original 
publication, were now casually beplastered with ~ 
perfunctory epithets, while the sincerest and most 
searching commendation was bestowed on the 
style and on the spirit of the plays, in their own 
day unconsidered by literary critics and not rec- 
ognized as having any claim to be esteemed as 
literature. Yet this commendation, pleasing even. 
if unforeseen, would not go to his head, since 
Shakspere—if we may venture to deduce his own 

95 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


views from the scattered evidence in his plays— 
had no unduly exalted opinion of poets or of 
poetry. 

If he might be agreeably surprized by the praise 
lavisht on him as a poet, he would be frankly 
bewildered by the commendation bestowed on him 
as a philosopher. He knew that he was not a 
man of solid learning, and that his reading, 
even if wide enough for his immediate purpose, 
had never been deep. He might admit that he 
had a certain insight into the affairs of men and 
a certain understanding of the intricate inter- 
relations of human motives. But he could never 
have considered himself as an original thinker, 
advancing the boundaries of knowledge or push- 
ing speculation closer to the confines of the un- 
knowable. All he had sought to do in the way 
of philosophy was now and again to phrase afresh 
as best he could one or another of the eternal com- 
monplaces, which need to be minted anew for the 
use of every oncoming generation. If a natural 
curiosity should tempt Shakspere to turn over 
a few pages of his critics to discover exactly what 
there was in his writings to give him rank among 
the philosophers, he would probably be more 
puzzled than before, until his sense of humor 
effected a speedy rescue. 

Bewildered as Shakspere might be to see him- 
self dissected as a philosopher, he would be startled 
to discover himself described also as a psychol- 
ogist. To him the word itself would be unknown 

96 


IF SHAKSPERE SHOULD COME BACKP 


and devoid of meaning, strange in sound and 
abhorrent in appearance. Even after it had been 
translated to him with explanation that he de- 
served discussion as a psychologist because he 
had created a host of veracious characters and 
had carried them thru the climax of their careers 
with subtle self-revelation, he might still wonder 
at this undue regard for the persons in his plays, 
whom he had considered not so much vital charac- 
ters as effective acting-parts devised by him to 
suit the several capacities of his fellow actors, 
Burbage and Arnim, Heming and Condell. It 
might be that these creatures of his invention 
were more than parts fitted to these actors; but 
none the less had they taken shape in his brain 
first of all as parts intended specifically for per- 
formance by specific tragedians and comedians. 
Only when Shakspere read commendation of 
his skill as a playwright, pure and simple, as a 
maker of plays to be performed by actors in a 
theater and before an audience, so constructed 
as to reward the efforts of the performers and to 
arouse and sustain the interest of the spectators— 
only then would he fail to be surprized at his 
posthumous reputation. He could not be un- 
aware that his plays, comic and tragic, or at least 
that the best of them, written in the middle of 
his career as a dramatist, were more adroitly put 
together than the pieces of any of his predecessors 
and contemporaries. He could not forget the 
pains he had taken to knit together the successive 
97 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


situations into a compelling plot, to provide his 
story with an articulated backbone of controlling 
motive, to stiffen the action with moments of 
tense suspense, to urge it forward to its inevitable 
and irresistible climax, to achieve effects of con- 
trast, and to relieve the tragic strain with inter- 
mittent humor. And even if it might mean little 
or nothing to him that he was exalted to a place 
beside and above Sophocles, the master of ancient 
tragedy, and Moliére, the master of modern com- 
edy, he might well be gratified to be recognized at 
last as a most accomplisht craftsman, ever dexter- 
ous in solving the problems of dramaturgic technic. 

These fanciful suggestions are based on the 
belief that Shakspere—like every other of the 
supreme artists of the world—‘“ builded better 
than he knew’’; and that this is a main reason 
why his work abides unendingly interesting to us 
three centuries after his death. He seems to 
have written, partly for self-expression, of course, 
but chiefly for the delight of his contemporaries, 
with no thought for our opinion fifteen score years 
later; and yet he wrought so firmly, so largely and 
so loftily that we may rightly read into his works 
a host of meanings which he did not consciously 
intend—and for which he can take the credit, 
none the less, because only he could have put them 
there. 


(1916.) 


98 


VI 
SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS * 


I 


T is unreasonable to expect that a financier, 

an artist or an actor should be able to talk en- 
tertainingly or to write instructively about his 
work in life. Sufficient is it if he can do this 
work satisfactorily, by dint of native gift; and 
we have no right to demand that he should al- 
ways be conscious of his processes. It is the 
business of the financier to make money useful 
—of the artist to paint pictures or to model 
statues, to design buildings or to lay out gardens, 
—of the actor to delight us by the impersonation 
of character involved in situation; and it is not 
necessary that any one of them should be a theorist 
of the art whereby he earns his living. Yet now 
and again artists appear who happen to possess 
the critical faculty as well as the creative; and 
whenever one thus doubly endowed is moved to 
discuss the practice of his calling and the princi- 


* This paper was contributed to ‘Shaksperian Studies’ 
(Columbia University Press, 1916); and it was read at a 
meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, on 
March 30th, 1916. 


99 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


ples of his craft, the rest of us will do well to listen 
attentively on the likely chance of picking up sug- 
gestions from which we may profit. What Reyn- 
olds and Fromentin and La Farge said about 
painting has an abiding value; and so have the 
less elaborate considerations of acting for which 
we are indebted to Talma, to Coquelin and to 
Jefferson. 

In ‘Art and the Actor,’ Coquelin’s plea for a 
fuller recognition of the importance and dignity 
of the histrionic profession, we are told that 
“there are but few masterpieces of dramatic 
literature so perfect that the actor cannot find 
something to add to them, if so inclined.” This 
assertion will seem boastful only to those belated 
expounders who still seem to think that Sophocles 
and Shakspere and Moliére wrote their plays 
solely for us moderns to peruse and who appear 
to believe blindly that these plays, composed 
expressly for the stage, will yet render up their full 
content to a lonely reader in the study. The 
perusal of the text will put us in possession of all 
the words of the dramatic poet; but only by per- 
formance in the theater itself is the spirit of a 
true drama made manifest and only before an 
actual audience can we gage its appeal to the soul 
of the multitude. The more familiar an open- 
minded reader may be with the printed lines of 
a dramatic masterpiece, the more likely is he 
to be delightedly surprized by the richness of 


100 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


detail and the fresh revelation of meaning when 
at last he has the privilege of seeing the play per- 
formed; and this rich revelation is always more 
or less, due to the inventive skill of the performers 
in elaborating the latent possibilities of the dialog, 
in short, to the “something added by the actor.” 

The devoted student who dwells remote from 
theaters, and who is thereby deprived of all op- 
portunity to see Shakspere’s comedies and trag- 
edies on the stage itself, may worship the poet 
with unquestioning idolatry; but he is in no posi- 
tion to estimate the full power of the playwright. 
He does not suspect how much more varied and 
colored and moving these comedies and these 
tragedies are when their characters are sustained 
by flesh-and-blood performers, when the words 
take on a new magic by the modulated tones of 
the human voice, and when the action is illustrated 
and illuminated by the appropriate by-play of the 
actors. This by-play, which is often team-play, 
this stage-business, as it is called, has been de- 
vised by successive generations of ingenious per- 
formers, every generation retaining the best of the 
inventions of its predecessors and handing these 
along (augmented by its own contributions) to 
the generation that comes after. Today the 
stage-manager who undertakes to produce a 
play of Shakspere’s has at his command an 1m- 
mense body of these traditions, many of which 
he may prefer not to utilize, altho he is certain 

IOI 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


to preserve others which serve to bring into high 
relief the inner significance of vital episodes. 

Such a body of gestures and actions is cherisht 
by the Comédie Francaise and utilized in its per- 
formances of Moliére’s comedies. “There are 
certain traditions at the Théatre Francais,” so 
Coquelin told us in his address on the actor’s 
art, “without which Moliére is never played, and 
which the spectator, becoming a reader, mentally 
supplies as he sits by his fireside, as one supplies 
omissions in an incomplete copy.” Some of these 
traditions are possibly derived directly from the 
original performances when the author-actor was 
the manager of the company; and some of them 
are the contribution of comedians as recent as 
Coquelin himself. They are so many, and they 
aid so amply in the interpretation of the plays, 
that Regnier brought out an edition of ‘Tar- 
tuffe’ wherein the best of the traditions which 
cluster around Moliére’s masterpiece were all 
carefully and elaborately set down to vivify the 
dialog. Regnier called this the ‘Tartuffe des 
Comédiens’; and Coquelin once told me that he 
proposed to continue his teacher’s task and to 
edit other of Moliére’s more important comedies 
with a similar amplitude of histrionic annotation. 
It is greatly to be regretted that the project 
was never carried out; no existing edition of 
Moliére would surpass this in interest or in utility, 
if it had been prepared with the skill, the tact, 

102 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


and the scholarship displayed by Regnier in his 
single volume. 

Coquelin asserted that the spectator of Moliére, 
becoming a reader, supplied mentally the illus- 
trative actions which he could not find in the 
text. But how about the reader of Moliére who 
has never been a spectatorP His memory can- 
not supply this material; and even if his imagina- 
tion is active, he can never invent as adroitly 
or as abundantly as the actors themselves, 
charged with the high responsibility of actual 
performance and trained to scrutinize the dialog 
assiduously in search of histrionic opportunity. 
The task which Regnier began and which Coquelin 
failed to carry out, may yet be completed by one 
or another of the comedians of the Théatre Fran- 
cais; and even before it is finally accomplisht 
for Moliére, it may be undertaken for Shakspere. 
The Shaksperian traditions are as many, as 
varied and as helpful; and they are now kept 
alive only by word of mouth, descending orally 
from actor to actor or preserved by the industry 
of a chance stage-manager in the flagrant inse- 
curity of an unprinted prompt-copy. 

When Macready retired from the active prac- 
tice of his profession, George Henry Lewes ex- 
prest the hope that the actor would devote 
his honorable leisure to the preparation of an 
edition of Shakspere, in which there should be due 
recognition of the fact that Shakspere was as great 


103 
LY 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


as a playwright as he was as a poet. The actor 
did not accept the invitation of the critic; and 
even if he had, we may doubt whether he would 
have condescended to record all the many tradi- 
tions of the theater, some of which he himself de- 
vised, while others he inherited from John Kem- 
ble and Edmund Kean, to pass along to Edwin 
Booth and Henry Irving. Sometimes a con- 
temporary criticism has recorded for us the name 
of the actor whose ingenuity was responsible for 
a striking effect developt out of the unadorned 
dialog and yet not discovered by any of his prede- 
cessors in the part; and sometimes the customary 
business is so old that its origin must be ascribed 
to a time whereof the memory of man runneth 
not to the contrary. 

While it is always interesting to know the name 
of the performer who first enricht the text with 
a felicitous accompaniment of pause and em- 
phasis, glance and gesture, what is really impor- 
tant to remember is that there is no single scene 
in any one of the more frequently acted comedies 
and tragedies which has not thus been made more 
pictorial and thereby more dramatic in the eyes 
of the actual spectators. Every edition pre- 
serves for us the words uttered by Othello and 
Jago in the marvelously built up crescendo when 
Iago distills the poison of jealousy drop by drop 
until Othello writhes in his overwhelming agony. 
But how did Iago deliver his corroding insinua- 

104 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


tions? How did Othello listen to them? Were 
they standing or sitting? What was the arrange- 
ment of the room? How was the mounting ac- 
tion intensified by looks and movements? How 
did the two actors play into each other’s hands to 
achieve the ultimate peak and summit to which 
all that went before had tended irresistibly? 
‘These things we do not find in any existing edition. 

It is idle to say that these things are relatively 
unimportant and that we have Shakspere’s 
words, which ought to suffice. Shakspere wrote 
his words specifically for actors, and for the inter- 
pretation and embellishment which only actors 
can give; and his words demand this interpre- 
tation and embellishment before they surrender 
their full content or disclose their ultimate po- 
tency. No commentary on Hamlet, of all the 
countless hundreds that have been written, 
would be a more useful aid to a larger under- 
standing of his character than a detailed record 
of the readings, the gestures, the business em-_ 
ployed in the successive performances of the part 
by Burbage and by Betterton, by Garrick and 
by Kemble, by Macready and by Forrest, by 
Booth and by Irving. It is not that any one of 
these renowned actors is necessarily superior in 
critical acumen to the more intellectual of the 
commentators; it is that they have been com- 
pelled by their professional training to acquire an 
insight into this character composed specifically 

105 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


for their use—an insight to be attained only in 
the theater itself and hopelessly unattainable in 
the library even by the most scholarly or by 
the most brilliant expositor. 


If 


OutTsipDE of her profession Mrs. Siddons was 
only an ordinary mortal; and the essay which she 
wrote on the character of Lady Macbeth is quite 
negligible. But inside of her profession she was 
a genius, gifted with an interpreting imagina- 
tion by means of which she projected a more 
commanding and more sinister figure than had 
ever been suspected to be latent in the relatively 
few speeches of the comparatively brief part of 
Lady Macbeth. Mrs. Siddons created the char- 
acter anew; she made it more dominating than 
it had ever been before; and in so doing she 
seems to have carried Shakspere’s intentions to 
a point which he could not have foreseen. When 
we survey the tragedy as a whole, we perceive 
that the dramatist spent his main effort on 
Macbeth himself, on the hero-villain who begins 
and ends the play, and that the heroine-villain 
is only an accessory character, marvelously sig- 
nificant, no doubt, but nevertheless subordinate. 
In writing the words of Macbeth, so Fleeming 
Jenkin finely suggested, Shakspere “cannot have 
had present to his mind all the gestures and ex- 

106 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


pressions of Lady Macbeth as she listened,”’ and 
yet this by-play of Mrs. Siddons “was such that 
the audience, looking at her, forgot to listen to 
Macbeth.” What Shakspere supplied was a 
mightily etcht outline for the performer of the 
part to color superbly; and Shakspere is a mas- 
terly playwright partly because his plays ever 
abound in opportunities to be improved by the 
insight of inspired actors. 

Fleeming Jenkin was not relying solely upon 
the casual discussion of Mrs. Siddons’ acting pre- 
served in contemporary criticisms; he was sup- 
ported by the detailed record of her readings, 
her intonations, her pauses, her glances, her 
gestures and her movements made by a compe- 
tent observer, Professor G. J. Bell, who annotated 
the text as he followed her performances night 
after night. And Professor Bell added to this 
invaluable account of what the great actress did 
in this great part, a summary of the total impres- 
sion made by her in the tragedy :—“ Of Lady Mac- 
beth there is not a great deal in the play, but 
the wonderful genius of Mrs. Siddons makes it 
the whole. ... Her turbulent and inhuman 
strength of spirit does all. She turns Macbeth 
to her purpose, makes him her mere instrument, 
guides, directs and inspires the whole plot. Like 
Macbeth’s evil genius she hurries him on in the 
mad career of ambition and cruelty from which 
his nature would have shrunk,” Possibly Shak- 

107 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


spere meant this; certainly he supplied the ma- 
terial for it; but it was the actress who brought 
out all the hidden possibilities of the character 
to an extent that the poet could scarcely have 
anticipated. 

Professor Bell declared that when she was im- 
personating Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Siddons was 
“not before an audience; her mind wrought up 
in high conception of her part, her eye never 
wandering, never for a moment idle, passion and 
sentiment continually betraying themselves. Her 
words are the accompaniments of her thoughts, 
scarcely necessary, you would imagine, to the 
expression, but highly raising it, and giving the 
full force of poetical effect.’’ 

This record of Mrs. Siddons’ Lady Macbeth is 
_ testimony to the truth of one striking passage in 
the illuminating paper which Fleeming Jenkin 
prepared to accompany it. The words uttered 
by any one of Shakspere’s chief characters, so the 
critic asserted, “do not by themselves supply the 
actor with one-hundredth part of the actions he 
has to perform. Every single word has to be 
spoken with just intonation and emphasis, while 
not a single intonation or emphasis is indicated by 
the printed copy. The actor must find the 
expression of face, the attitude of body, the 
action of the limbs, the pauses, the hurries—the 
life, in fact. There is no logical process by which 
all these things can be evolved out of the mere 

108 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


words of a part. The actor must go direct to na- 
ture and his own heart for the tones and the 
action by which he is to move his audience; these 
his author cannot give him, and in creating these, 
if he be a great actor, his art is supremely great.’ 
Here Fleeming Jenkin is putting into other words 
the almost contemporary assertion of Coquelin 
that “there are but few masterpieces so perfect 
that the actor cannot find something to add to 
them.” And all that the supremely great actors 
can imagine to move an audience, the printed 
dialog is devoid of; and the mere reader in the 
library cannot restore it unless he has earlier been 
a spectator in the theater itself. 


Ill 


Just as Regnier’s ‘Tartuffe des Comédiens’ af- 
forded a model for the editing of Moliére, so we 
have in English at least one attempt to supply an 
edition of a Shaksperian play as it was interpreted 
by the genius of a great actor. This is E. T. Ma- 
son’s record of Salvini’s Othello, in which we 
find all that the fortunate spectators of that 
massive performance need when they become 
readers and when they endeavor to supply men- 
tally the tones and the gestures with which the 
Italian actor illuminated the English tragedy. 
Mr. Mason gave us portraits of the actor cos- 
tumed for the part; and he supplied descriptions 

109 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


and diagrams of all the stage-sets used by Salvini. 
He set down the tragedian’s readings, his glances 
and his gestures, and his movements about the 
stage; and so complete is this record that a lonely 
student who had never been able to see Othello 
performed would get from it a fuller disclosure of 
the essential energy of the tragedy than he could 
possibly have had before. 

It is true that the lonely student might have 
been aided in the effect to evoke in his mind’s 
eye an imagined performance by a collection 
and a comparison of contemporary criticisms of 
actual performances by Edmund Kean, by Ma- 
cready and by Edwin Booth; and he would find 
especially helpful Lewes’ noble tribute to Sal- 
vini's tremendous exhibition of power at the 
highest point of the wonderfully wrought scene 
in which [ago unchains the demon of jealousy in 
Othello. “But the whole house was swept 
along by the intense and finely graduated cul- 
mination of passion in the outburst, ‘Villain, be 
sure you prove’ when seizing Iago and shaking 
him as a lion might shake a wolf, he finishes by 
flinging him on the ground, raises his foot to 
trample on the wretch—and then.a sudden re- 
vulsion of feeling checks the brutality of the 
act, the gentleman masters the animal, and. with 
mingled remorse and disgust he stretches forth 
a hand to raise him up.” 

Yet eloquent as this passage is, it is not so 

T10 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


useful to the lonely student as Mr. Mason’s mi- 
nute account of all that was done in the course 
of the entire act of which this was the climax. 
Helpful also are the invaluable notes on his own 
procedure when acting Othello or Iago contrib- 
uted by Edwin Booth to the volume on ‘Othello’ 
in Furness’ ‘Variorum Edition.’ More than any 
preceding editor did Furness perceive the im- 
portance of considering the actors’ specific con- 
tribution to an adequate understanding of Shak- 
spere’s merits as a playwright; and therefore all 
the later volumes of the “Variorum’ are enricht 
by more or less criticism of actual performances, 
often with indication of readings and of business. 
Here and there also in the ample volumes of Wil- 
liam Winter’s ‘Shakspere on the Stage’ we find 
loving record of the manner in which culminating 
moments were rendered by the foremost Shak- 
sperian actors and actresses of the past half-cen- 
tury. For example, Winter has preserved for 
us the interesting fact that it was Adelaide Neil- 
son who first caused Juliet on the balcony to pluck 
the flowers from her breast and to throw them 
down to Romeo with an apparently unpre- 
meditated gesture expressive of the ecstasy of her 
overmastering passion. 

Again in Clara Morris’ account of her ear- 
lier years on the stage she credits herself with 
the invention of an intensification of the dra- 
matic effect in the final act of ‘Othello.’ Al- 

Ill 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


tho she was then only a slip of a girl she was 
called upon to impersonate the mature Emilia. 
After the death of Desdemona Emilia gives the 
alarm, crying aloud, 

Help! Help! Oh, help! 

The Moor hath killed my mistress! Murder! 

Murder! 

and then the bell tolls a general alarm. The 
young actress arranged with the prompter that 
the bell should sound immediately after her 
shriek for 


Help! Help! 
After this first stroke she raised her voice and 
cried, 

Help! Oh, help! 


whereupon the bell rang out again and again. 
Instantly she resumed her outcry, 

The Moor hath killed my mistress ! 

And then the bell once more tolled the alarm. 
Finally she shriekt, 

Murder! Murder! 
and the tolling was repeated until Montano and 
Gratiano and Iago rush in. Miss Morris is 
pleased to inform us that the result of this novel 
punctuation of her lines by the brazen tongue of 
the tocsin was to make her voice seem to combine 
with the clangor and to soar above it. 

It would be pleasant to know whether or not 
the late William F. Owen should be credited with 
the devising of the felicitous business which en- 

II2 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


hanced Falstaff’s reception of Prince Hal’s ex- 
posure of his mendacity in the matter of the men 
in buckram, when a condensation of the two parts 
of ‘Henry IV’ was produced by Robert Taber 
and Julia Marlowe. After Falstaff has told his 
tale the Prince and Poins corner him. The scene 
represented the tavern at Eastcheap with its 
huge fireplace before which stood a spacious arm- 
chair with its back to the audience. After 
Falstaff had met the Prince’s incredulity with 
abuse, he cried, “O for breath to utter !”’ and then 
he sank into the chair, sputtering out his final in- 
sults. Whereupon the Prince explained that:— 
“We two saw you four set upon four, and were 
masters of their wealth. Mark now, how plain a 
tale shall put you down.” 

As soon as Falstaff was convinced that his bluff 
was about to be called he shrank into the chair 
and the back of his head was no longer to be seen; 
so the Prince stated his case to an invisible Fal- 
staff, ending with “What trick? what device? 
what starting hole cans’t thou now find out, to 
hide thee from this open and apparent shame?r”’ 
Then Henry paused for a reply and it was so long 
in coming, that Poins backed up the Prince, say- 
ing, “Come, let’s hear, Jack. What trick hast 
thou nowP”’ 

Falstaff out of sight of the audience had twisted 
himself about in the chair until he was kneeling on 
it; and he slowly raised his face above its back— 

113 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


a face wreathed with smiles and ready to break 
into triumphant laughter, as at last he was ready 
with his retort: “I knew ye—as well as he that 
made ye! Why, hear ye, my masters; was it for 
me to kill the heir apparent? Should I turn 
upon the true PrinceP” 

Whether this business was Owen’s own, or 
Robert Taber’s, or inherited from Samuel Phelps,* 
it is excellent; and it deserves to be set down in 
the margin of the actor’s edition of the play. 
And there are countless other histrionic accre- 
tions which also demand to be preserved. Valu- 
able as are Winter’s and Booth’s and Lewes’ 
descriptions, Bell’s record of Mrs. Siddons as 
Lady Macbeth and Mason’s account of Salvini’s 
Othello, they preserve for us only a few of the 
greater moments of a few of the greatest plays as 
performed by great actors. 

We want more than this; we need to have in 
black and white the whole body of stage-tradition. 
We ought to have all the valuable readings and all 
the accessory business set down carefully and pre- 
served permanently, for if these things are al- 
lowed to slip from the memory of the few who now 
know them, they can never be recovered. It may 
be admitted frankly that some of these traditions 
are incongruous excrescences, occasionally foolish 
and sometimes offensive, handed down thought- 

*Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson tells me that he does 
not recall it in Phelps’ performance. 

114 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


lessly from a time when the essential quality of 
Shakspere was less highly appreciated than it is 
today. There is no reason for regret, for in- 
stance, that the Second Gravedigger in ‘Hamlet’ 
no longer delays the action and disturbs the 
spirit of Ophelia’s burial by stripping off an un- 
expected sequence of waistcoats to the delight 
of the unthinking—a clowning device which, 
oddly enough, is also traditional at the end of 
Moliére’s ‘Précieuses Ridicules,’ where it is not 
out of place since it is there quite in keeping with 
the tone of that lively little comedy. And per- 
haps there would be no loss if Romeo and Mercutio 
ceased to bewilder Peter when he is delivering the 
invitations by a succession of ironic salutations, 
just as Gratiano and Bassanio bewilder Gobbo, 
the business being identical in both plays and 
having no warrant in the text of either. 

These may be dismist as unwarrantable ob- 
trusions to be discarded unhesitatingly; but to 
admit this is not to discredit the utility of the 
traditions in general. They are to be received 
as precious heirlooms, a legacy to the present and 
to the future, from the finest performers and from 
the most adroit stage-managers of the past, a 
store of accumulated devices always to be con- 
sidered carefully, to be selected from judiciously 
and to be cast aside only after mature considera- 
tion. And, first of all, before any selection can 
be attempted, these traditions need all of them 

115 





THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


to be placed on record for what they are worth. 
Moreover, as the value of a suggestion, if not its 
validity, is due in part at least to the reputation 
of its suggester, the record ought (in so far as this 
is now possible) to register also the name of the 
originator of every specific piece of business and 
of every illuminating reading. 


IV 


JoHN Puitip KeEmBLE, for example, altho a 
little austere and chilly as an actor, was a most 
fertile deviser of points; and it is believed that 
some of the most striking effects made by Mrs. 
Siddons were due to the inventiveness of her 
brother. One of these, and one of the most 
characteristic, is in the trial scene of ‘Henry 
VIII.” Queen Katharine comes before the King 
and the two cardinals, Wolsey and Campeius, 
sitting as judges of the legality of her marriage 
to Henry; and she begins by an appeal to her 
husband. When she makes an end, Wolsey, 
whom she knows for her personal enemy, counters 
by asserting the integrity and the learning of the 
judges of the case; and Campeius very courte- 
ously suggests that the royal session proceed. 
Then there follow these two speeches: 


Queen. Lord Cardinal, 
To you I speak. 
Wolsey. |Your pleasure, madam. 
116 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


But there are two cardinals present before her, 
and Campeius has just spoken. Why then should 
Wolsey alone answer when the Queen says, 

Lord Cardinal, to you I speak? 

The actress can, of course, suggest a sufficient 
reason for Wolsey’s taking her words to himself 
by looking at him when she begins: yet this is 
barely sufficient, since the two cardinals are 
sitting side by side and the Queen is at some little 
distance. When Kemble played Wolsey and Mrs. 
Siddons was Queen Katharine this is how the brief 
dialog was managed. At the end of Campeius’ 
sentence or two, the Queen spoke, 

Lord Cardinal, 
and then paused, whereupon Campeius rose and 
moved a little toward her, evidently believing that 
she was about to answer him. As he approacht 
her she turned from him impatiently, so Professor 
Bell has recorded, immediately making a sweet 
but dignified bow of apology. “Then to Wolsey, 
turned and looking from him, with her hand 
pointing back to him, in a voice of thunder, 

To you I speak! 

The effect of this outburst is so electric that it 
has been repeated in the subsequent revivals of 
‘Henry VIII,’ as I can testify from my memory of 
Charlotte Cushman’s performance, Modjeska’s 
and Ellen Terry’s; and in so arranging it Kemble 
made a permanent contribution to the staging 
of Shakspere.”’ 

117 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


As much cannot be said for an infelicitous in- 
vention of Sarah-Bernhardt’s when she rashly 
ventured to exhibit herself as Hamlet. In the 
interview between Hamlet and the Queen in which 
he speaks daggers but uses none, he bids his 
mother contrast her two husbands: 

Look here, upon this picture and on this. 

How are those two portraits to be shown to the 
spectators? or are they to be shown at all? 
Henry Irving accepted them as purely imaginary, 
seen only in the mind’s eye; and so did Edwin 
Booth sometimes, altho he often preferred 
to wear a miniature of his father, pendant from 
his neck so that he might compare this with a 
miniature of his uncle which his mother wore 
suspended also by a chain. Fechter tore the 
miniature of his uncle from the Queen’s neck 
after contrasting it with a painting of his father 
hanging on the wall. Betterton had two half- 
length portraits side by side above the wainscot. 
Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt employed a pair of full- 
length paintings, framed high up in the wood- 
work on the wall facing the Queen as she sat: 
and when the young Prince expatiated piously 
on his father’s qualities, physical and moral, the 
portrait of the elder Hamlet suddenly became 
transparent and thru it the audience beheld 
the Ghost—a trivial spectacular trick which im- 
mediately distracted the attention of the specta- 
tors, 

118 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


Irving’s suppression of visible portraits was 
perhaps more in accord with the spirit of the 
episode (and of the play as a whole) than was 
Booth’s occasional use of two miniatures; cer- 
tainly it was simpler. And yet Irving was rarely 
as simple as Booth. The American tragedian 
was wont to rely boldly on his mastery of the art 
of acting, whereas the British character-actor 
felt it advisable to support his impersonation 
by every possible device of the stage-manager. 
Irving may or may not have suspected the limita- 
tions of his accomplishment as an actor, whereas 
in stage-management his supremacy over all his 
contemporaries was indisputable. He was in- 
cessantly fertile and unfailingly dexterous in the 
discovery of novel methods for vivifying Shak- 
spere’s dialog. For the scene of Jessica’s elope- 
ment in the ‘Merchant of Venice’ he designed a 
characteristic Venetian set—a piazzetta with 
Shylock’s house on the right and with a bridge 
over the canal which crosses the stage. Shylock 
bids Jessica lock herself in; and then he goes 
away over the bridge to the supper to which he 
has been invited. It is the carnival season; and 
a merry band of maskers revels past with light 
laughter. Then Gratiano comes on; and a 
gondola glides up from which Lorenzo steps out. 
They hail Jessica, who throws to them out of the 
window her father’s casket of jewels and money, 
after which she descends and unlocks the door, and 

119 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


comes out in boy’s apparel, and lets her lover bear 
her away in the gondola. Gratiano remains and 
exchanges a few words with Antonio, who has 
chanced by. When they have gone, the maskers 
gaily flash across the bridge once more; and 
after a little the stage is left empty. Then in the 
distance we hear the tapping of Shylock’s staff, 
and soon we see him crossing the bridge to stand 
at last knocking at the door of his now robbed and 
deserted home. It is only when he has knockt 
a second time that the curtain slowly falls, leav- 
ing us to imagine for ourselves his grief and his 
rage when he finds out his double misfortune. 

Again in the trial-scene, after Shylock is baf- 
fled and despoiled, he asks leave to go. 

I am not well. Send the deed after me, and 
I will sign it. 

Irving made his exit and there was silence for 
a little space, suddenly broken by the angry mur- 
murs of the mob outside, hooting at the discom- 
fited usurer. For neither of these effects is there 
any warrant in Shakspere’s text; the first was 
impossible on the sceneless stage of the Globe 
theater, and the second was too subtle for the 
ruder tastes of Tudor audiences: and yet both 
are perfectly in keeping with the temper and spirit 
of the play. 

It is to be noted, however, that Irving missed 
a moving dramatic effect in allowing Ellen Terry 
to declaim the lines on the Quality of Mercy in 

I20 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


accord with the customary delivery of that ora- 
tion, treating it as an eloquent opportunity for 
triumphant elocution. Ada Rehan adjusted the 
speech more artistically to the situation; Portia 
has told Shylock that he must be merciful, and he 
has scornfully askt, 

On what compulsion must I P 

Whereupon Portia explains to him the blessings 
of mercy—and Ada Rehan then spoke the speech 
as a summons to his better self, addressing herself 
directly to him, evidently inspired by the hope 
that her plea might soften his heart and watching 
eagerly to discover if it did. Thus treated the 
beautiful appeal intensified the dramatic poign- 
ancy of the moment; and thus treated it seems 
to be more completely in harmony with Shak- 
spere’s intent. 

Yet there is danger always in spending undue 
effort in a vain attempt to discover what Shak- 
spere or any other dramatist meant to do, instead 
of centering our attention upon what he actually 
did, whatever his intent may have been. It is 
highly probable, for instance, that Shakspere 
intended Shylock to be a despicable villain de- 
testable to all spectators; but what Shakspere 
actually did was to create an indisputable human 
being, arousing our sympathy at the very time 
when we hold him in horror. Fanny Kemble saw 
Edmund Kean in 1827, and she recorded that he 
“entirely divested Shylock of all poetry or eleva- 

i228 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


tion, but invested it with a concentrated ferocity 
that made one’s blood curdle.’”’ Quite possibly all 
that Shakspere intended was this concentrated 
ferocity, but none the less did he lend poetry and 
elevation to the sinister character. Kean may 
have performed Shylock in accord with Shak- 
spere’s intent; but Irving and Booth, both of 
them, preferred to reveal rather the poetry and 
the elevation with which Shakspere had dowered 
the character. If Shylock has poetry and eleva- 
tion, it is because Shakspere gave them to him, 
even if he knew not what he did: and it is always 
what the artist actually did, and not merely what 
he meant to do, which we need to perceive clearly. 

Later generations read into a masterpiece of art 
many a meaning which the author might disclaim 
and yet which may be contained in it, none the 
less, because the great artist is great only because 
he has “‘builded better than he knew,” even if he 
left latent what seem to us patent. A wide 
gulf yawns between us and our Tudor ancestors: 
and in the centuries that separate us there must 
have been many changes in taste, in opinion and 
in prejudice. To the stalwart and stout-stom- 
ached Elizabethans Shylock may have appeared 
as one kind of a creature, while he seems to us a 
very different being, more human mainly because 
we ourselves are more humane. I rving’s pathetic 
return of Shylock to his abandoned home would 
have been hooted by the groundlings of the Globe: 


I22 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


and yet it is a pictorial embellishment which serves 
to bring out the Shylock whom we watch with 
commingled abhorrence and sympathy, even 
tho Shakspere might himself protest that sym- 
pathy should not be wasted on his sordid serio- 
comic villain. 


Vv 


InN its time Fechter’s Hamlet was the cause of 
a plentiful waste of ink, let loose by the deliberate 
novelty of his performance. Fundamentally 
Fechter was an emotional rather than an intel- 
lectual actor; and what chiefly interested him in 
the tragedy was not so much the character of 
Hamlet as the swift succession of striking situa- 
tions. To him the ‘Hamlet’ of Shakspere was 
like the “Ruy Blas’ of Victor Hugo, essentially 
a melodrama altho adorned with exquisite 
poetry—and there is this much to be said for 
Fechter’s view, that we can still catch sight of the 
supporting skeleton of the coarser tragedy-of- 
blood which Shakspere endowed with the hu- 
manity of a true tragedy. Where English 
actors had been a little inclined to see an embodi- 
ment of philosophic reflection, sicklied o’er with 
the pale cast of thought, the French actor saw a 
romantic hero entangled in a complexity of 
pathetic situations; and what interested him was 
rather the theatrical effectiveness of these situa- 
tions than the soul of the hero himself. To Fech- 

123 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


ter, Hamlet was a picturesque part for the lead- 
ing man of the Porte Saint Martin; and he nat- 
urally treated the play as he would treat any 
other Porte Saint Martin melodrama, to be 
made as emotionally effective as might be and 
to be presented as pictorially as possible. 

As Hamlet was a Dane, Fechter presented 
him as a blond, adorning his head with locks not 
exactly flaxen in tint but rather reddish. (On 
this point doubt is not possible since the wig that 
Fechter used to wear as Hamlet is now piously 
preserved among the other histrionic memorabilia 
on exhibition in the club-house of The Players 
in New York.) Himself a sculptor in his youth 
and always closely associated with artists pic- 
torial and plastic, Fechter was fertile in design- 
ing the scenic habiliment of the plays he produced. 
A large part of the action of ‘Hamlet’ was made 
to take place in the main hall of the castle of 
Elsinore. In this spacious room we saw the 
performance of the ‘Mousetrap’ and also the 
fencing match of the final act. This hall filled 
the stage; it had broad doors at the back, and 
above this portal was a gallery with smaller doors 
at both ends leading off to upper rooms and with 
curving stairways descending on either side. 
Many of the exits and entrances were made by 
means of one or another of these stairways; and 
Fechter utilized them artfully when the time came 
for the killing of the King. The throne upon 


124 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


which Claudius sat to behold the fencing was on 
one side. Kate Field’s record of the business, 
in her biography of Fechter, conforms to my own 
recollection of it:— 

“The moment Hamlet exclaimed 


Ho! let the door be lockt. 
Treachery! Seek it out! 


“the King exhibited signs of fear; and while 
Laertes made his terrible confession, the regicide 
stole to the opposite stairs, shielding himself 
from Hamlet’s observation behind a group of 
courtiers who, paralized with horror, failed to 
remark the action. Laertes no sooner uttered 
the words 

The King’s to blame! 


than Hamlet turned suddenly to the throne in 
search of his victim. Discovering the ruse he 
rushed up the left-hand stairs, to meet the King 
in the center of the gallery and stabbed him. 
‘f As he descended the stairs the potent 
poison stole upon Hamlet, who, murmuring 


The rest is silence ! 


fell dead upon the corpse of Laertes, thus show- 
ing his forgiveness of treachery and remembrance 
of Ophelia.” 


125 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


VI 


MENTION has already been made of Ada 
Rehan’s method of delivering the appeal to Shy- 
lock’s better nature in which she described the 
quality of mercy. In defauit of evidence I cannot 
say whether her attitude was derived from a tradi- 
tion which had not been preserved in such other 
performances of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ as | 
have been permitted to see, or whether it was 
assumed for the first time in Augustin Daly’s last 
production of the play. Daly was a producer—to 
use the term now accepted in the theater—of 
singular individuality, familiar with accepted 
traditions, and yet often preferring to discard 
them in favor of novelties of his devising. On 
occasion he exhibited a wrongheadness which was 
almost perverse in its eccentricity; but far more 
frequently his originality manifested itself in 
unhackneyed arrangements which set familiar 
passages in a new light. 

Of all his Shaksperian revivals the ‘Taming of 
the Shrew’ was perhaps the most completely satis- 
fying in its sumptuous stage-setting and in its 
intricate stage-management, yet his presentation 
of ‘As You Like It’ was a close second. As he 
was a martinet in the discipline of his company, 
we may credit to him rather than to the actor 
himself a new departure in the interpretation of 
the character of Jaques. In the structure of 

126 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


‘As You Like It’ Shakspere closely followed the 
story of Lodge’s ‘Rosalynde’; yet he introduced 
several figures not to be found in this source. 
One of these is Jaques, who has nothing whatever 
to do with the plot of the piece, who seems to 
exist for his own sake, and who is allowed to 
usurp the attention of the audience for his self- 
revelatory harangues. I have suggested else- 
“where that possibly Jaques was invented for the 
sole purpose of providing a part for Burbage 
—a part rich in elocutionary opportunities. 
Now, what manner of man is this Jaques, created 
to disclose himself not by action but only by 
discourse P 

Richard Grant White maintained “that what 
Jaques meant by melancholy was what we now 
call cynicism—a sullen, scoffing, snarling spirit.” 
In the view of the American critic, Jaques “was 
one of those men who believe in nothing good, 
and who as the reason of their lack of faith in 
human nature and of hope of human happiness, 
and their want of charity, tell us that they have 
seen the world.” White declared that in de- 
livering the speech on the seven ages of man, 
Jaques seizes “the occasion to sneer at the repre- 
sentatives of the whole human race.” 

For this opinion of Jaques the critic claimed 
originality for himself, asserting that it was 
contrary to that usually shown on the stage. 
Since White first stated it in 1854, 1t has succeeded 

127 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


in acclimating itself in the theater, where Jaques 
has frequently been presented as an embittered 
despiser of mankind; in fact, it bids fair to estab- 
lish itself as the accepted stage-tradition. This 
reading of the part is attractive to the actor of 
Jaques, since it increases the wilful perversity of 
his personality and makes the character stand 
out in bold relief, his malignity contrasting with 
the kindliness of the Duke and of his genial com- 
panions in the forest. 

But is this necessarily the right reading of the 
part? Is there ever any one interpretation of the 
more richly rounded characters of Shakspere’s 
plays which we must accept as undeniably the 
only admissible rendering? In his more ambi- 
tious figures Shakspere is not satisfied to give us 
mere outlines, profiles, silhouettes, to be seen 
from one angle only; he bestows upon them the 
rotundity of real life; and we may dispute 
about them, as we dispute about the characters 
of our acquaintances and of prominent men in 
public life. No critic may feel entitled to assert 
that he has attained to a final decision as to the 
exact character of Hamlet or Shylock or Jaques; 
and every one of us is justified in defending his 
own opinion as to these creatures of imagination 
all compact. 

Certainly it was a Jaques very unlike White’s 
that Daly showed us in his revival of ‘As You 
Like It.” Daly held that Jaques is a humorist, 

128 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


recognized as such by all his comrades—a humor- 
ist who affects to be a satirist and who is not to 
be taken too seriously. And Jaques himself is 
quite conscious of this tolerant and amused atti- 
tude of his fellows toward him and that they are 
always expecting him to take antagonistic views 
and are always wondering what he is going to 
say next, ever ready for his exaggerated out- 
breaks and ever ready to laugh with him, even if 
they are also laughing at him. As Jaques is 
aware of their expectation, he responds to it; 
he gives them what they are looking for; he 
abounds in his own sense; he looses free rein to 
his wit and to his whimsical fantasy, certain that 
his customary hearers will know that there is no 
sting to his satire. Such men are not uncommon 
nowadays in real life; and in the threatening 
monotony of our modern existence they are 
eagerly welcomed and their over-emphatic utter- 
ances are awaited with smiling expectancy. 

It was thus that Daly conceived the character 
of Jaques and that he arranged the way in which 
the other actors should receive the outpourings 
of the self-conscious humorist. When Orlando 
breaks in upon the feast and demands food for 
Adam, the Duke bids him go and fetch the faith- 
ful old servant. ‘The interval between Orlando’s 
departure and his return with Adam must be 
filled up so that the audience may not be forced 
to feel that it has been kept waiting; and Shak- 

129 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


spere drafts Jaques for this service. After Or- 
lando goes, the Duke remarks that 


We are not all alone unhappy. 

This wide and universal theater 

Presents more woful pageants than the scene 
Wherein we play in. 


Here Jaques sees his opportunity and declares 
that 


All the world’s a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players. 


Then he pauses, to observe whether this meets 
with approval; and the others smile back, as if 
to encourage him to proceed. Thus heartened 
by their sympathetic attention he takes up his 
parable and evolves the theory of the seven ages 
of man. He is not reciting a set speech, prepared 
in advance; he is extemporizing, sometimes 
hesitating for the right word, and always acutely 
sensitive to the effect he is producing upon his 
listeners. Thus delivered the speech is robbed 
of its bitterness and emptied of its cynicism. 
And as it falls from the lips of Jaques its hearers 
exchange glances in recognition of the fact that 
their humorous friend is in excellent vein, sur- 
passing himself in whimsical exaggeration, even 
if he ends, as humorists are wont to do, upon a 
note of melancholy. 

130 


\ 


SHAKSPERIAN STAGE-TRADITIONS 


When the familiar words are spoken under 
these conditions they have a freshness which is 
totally absent if Jaques declaims them as part of 
a set speech. In his illuminating address on the 
‘Illusion of the First Time in Acting,’ William 
Gillette* has dwelt on the danger to which the 
drama is exposed whenever the actor carelessly 
reveals himself as knowing by heart the words 
which the character is supposed to be uttering 
without premeditation. There is always a temp- 
tation for the performer to see in the Seven Ages 
and the Quality of Mercy, in Hamlet’s soliloquy 
and Mark Antony’s appeal, an opportunity for 
an elocutionary exhibition, perhaps effective 
enough in itself, yet damaging to the total effect 
of the play. To turn every one of these speeches 
into a piece to be spoken may not be fairly de- 
scribed as a stage-tradition; yet the practice is far 
too prevalent in the acting of Shakspere to-day, 
and it is probably an inheritance from the past. 
There would be a stimulus to the adoption of a 
better method if the actor’s edition of Shakspere 
should record the various devices by which this 
danger has been averted. 

In this paper it has been possible to adduce only 


*It may be noted that Gillette’s address and the essays 
of Coquelin and Fleeming Jenkin, from which quotation 
has been made in this paper, are all reprinted in the Second 
Series of the Publications of the Dramatic Museum of 
Columbia University (1915). 

131 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


a few of the many instances where an unexpected 
illumination of Shakspere’s text has been accom- 
plisht by inventive actors and by ingenious 
stage-managers, who have made explicit what 
they believed to be implicit in the dialog. Where 
they found only the seed itself, they have shown 
the expanding flower potentially contained within 
it. What they have done for Shakspere they have 
done for Moliére and for Sheridan; and this 1s 
one reason why the accredited classics of the 
drama are likely to seem to us, when we see them 
on the stage, ampler in detail and solider in texture 
than the plays of our own time, which have not yet 
been able to profit by the contributions of genera- 
tion after generation of actors and stage-managers. 
And a warm welcome awaits the editor who shall 
employ the most significant of these stage-tradi- 
tions to vivify the text of his edition of Shakspere. 


(1916.) 


132 


VII 
THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA 


I 


S we look down the long history of dramatic 
literature we cannot help seeing that the suc- 
cessful playwrights may be assorted into different 
groups. They are all of them, of course, first and 
foremost playwrights—that is to say, they all 
possess the innate and instinctive gift of arous- 
ing and of retaining the interest of the playgoers 
of their own time and of their own country. 
They are all story-tellers on the stage, because a 
play needs a plot above all else, if it is to please 
long and to please many. But the kind of story 
they will select and the degree of importance 
they will give to the story itself will depend on 
their own differing attitude toward life and their 
own special qualifications. 

Some successful playwrights are poets, essen- 
tially dramatic, like Sophocles and Shakspere, 
or essentially lyric like Rostand and d’Annunzio. 
Some are social satirists, like Moliére and Beau- 
marchais. Some are wits like Sheridan or 
humorists like Labiche. Some, like Ibsen, are 
primarily psychologists creating characters to 

133 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


be revealed in successive situations; and some, 
like Brieux, are sociologists dealing with the 
problems of the day. Some are journalists, as 
Aristophanes was on occasion and as Sardou was 
in his earlier comedies of contemporary Paris. 
Some are preachers, like Bernard Shaw. And 
some of them are simply story-tellers, pure and 
simple, not poets or psychologists or philosophers, 
not humorists or journalists, but merely con- 
cocters of plots, so adroitly put together that the 
acted narratives amuse us in the playhouse and 
give us the special pleasure to be found only in 
the theater, without providing us with the added 
delight which we derive from the veracious and 
significant portrayal of men and women. 

Of these story-tellers of the stage, content to 
be story-tellers only and satisfied to rely on the 
attraction of a sequence of ingenious situations 
artfully articulated, Scribe is the chief. He is 
not a poet; he is not even a man of letters; he 
does not make us think; he does not deposit in 
our memories anything worthy of remembrance. 
All he can do is to amuse us while we are in the 
playhouse with the mechanical dexterity of the 
story he is setting before us by the aid of all the 
devices of the theater. He is a story-teller on 
the stage and nothing else; but he is one of the 
indisputable masters of stage story-telling. His 
stories may be empty, arbitrary, artificial; but 
they are sufficient unto themselves. He is suc- 

134 


THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA 


cessful in achieving all that he is ambitious of 
attaining—the entertainment of the spectators, 
by the exhibition of his surpassing skill in in- 
venting and in combining effective situations. 

It may be admitted that merely as a crafts- 
man he is not more dexterous than certain of the 
greater dramatists. As sheer machinery nothing 
of his is better in its kind than the exposition of 
‘Othello’ or of ‘Tartuffe’; and he never put 
together a plot more artistically wrought out 
than those of ‘Cedipus the King’ or of ‘Ghosts.’ 
But Shakspere and Moliére, Sophocles and Ibsen, 
while they reveal themselves as the most accom- 
plisht of technicians, are not content to be 
technicians only and the larger, loftier and nobler 
qualities of their dramas are so abundantly evi- 
dent that few of us ever pay attention to their 
marvelous mastery of technic. But Scribe was 
nothing but a technician; and it is solely by his 
mastery of technic that he maintained himself 
in the theater for two score years. 

He was astonishingly fertile; and his produc- 
tivity was exhibited in almost every department 
of the drama,—in farce, in the comedy of anec- 
dote, in opéra-comique, in grand opera, and even 
in librettos for the ballet. He did not lay his 
scenes always in his native land, whose manners 
and customs he could not help knowing; at one 
time or another he ventured to manufacture 
plots supposed to take place in almost every 

135 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


habitable country in the globe. The ‘Bataille 
de Dames’ and ‘Adrienne Lecouvreur’ were 
stories of France; but the action of the ‘Dame 
Blanche’ took place in Scotland, that of ‘Fra 
Diavolo’ in Italy, that of ‘La Juive’ in Spain, 
that of ‘Le Prophéte’ in Germany, and that of 
‘L’Africaine’ partly in Africa. In one piece, sug- 
gested by Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Lionel Lincoln,’ 
he even ventured to cross the western ocean and 
to take Boston for his background. 

Sometimes, as in the case of the Cooper adapta- 
tion and of the ‘Dumb Girl of Portici’ he had to 
go abroad because the original of the story he 
was setting on the stage was foreign and could not 
well be made French. And sometimes, on the 
other hand, he transported his tale to a far coun- 
try, to a land other than his own, so that he could 
attribute to it the manners and the customs and 
the laws which he needed to enable him to im- 
mesh the puppets of his plot in the thrilling situa- 
tions he had invented. He did not set out on 
these travels to capture the local color of the 
countries he might visit, as Hugo had essayed to 
do in ‘Hernani’ and in ‘Ruy Blas.’ Scribe’s 
local color was always sporadic and superficial. 
He went far afield in order to profit by conditions 
different from those familiar to French playgoers; 
and these conditions were not necessarily those 
which actually obtained in the foreign parts to 
which he exiled the personages of his plays; 

136 


THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA 


they were those which he needed to bring about 
the events he was devising. Therefore the 
manners and the customs and the laws which 
we find in many of the stories of Scribe set before 
us on the stage are not really those of Spain or 
Italy, of England or Germany, of Africa or 
America; they were in fact almost as much 
Scribe’s own invention as the stories themselves. 


II 


SCRIBE’s frequent departures from the facts of 
history and of geography were promptly noted by 
contemporary critics more familiar with foreign 
lands than he was; and they accused him of 
having imagined a country of his own, to which 
they gave his name—La Scribie—Scribia—a 
very useful country for a playwright because its 
social conventions existed solely for the play- 
wright’s convenience and because they might 
be modified unceasingly as the exigencies of 
plot making demanded. When Andrew Lang 
first heard of this fabled domain, he was moved 
to the composition of a lyric, which he called 
‘Partant pour la Scribie.’ 


A pleasant land is Scribie, where 
The light comes mostly from below, 
And seems a sort of symbol rare 
Of things at large, and how they go. 
137 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


In rooms where doors are everywhere 
And cupboards shelter friend and foe. 


A land of lovers false and gay; 
A land where people dread a curse; 

A land of letters gone astray, 
Or intercepted, which is worse; 

Where weddings false fond maids betray, 
And all the babes are changed at nurse. 


Oh, happy land, where things come right 

We, of the world where things go ill; 
Where lovers love, but don’t unite; 

Where no one finds the Missing Will— 
Dominion of the heart’s delight, 

Scribie, we’ve loved, and love thee still! 


Unfortunately the lyrist who rimed this de- 
lectable description had allowed himself to be 
deceived by a traveler’s tale rarely to be relied 
upon. The land for which he has here exprest 
his longing is not the true Scribia, as this is ac- 
curately mapped on the atlas of imaginary 
geography. It is an adjoining territory first ex- 
plored by Jerome K. Jerome and explained in his 
authoritative book of travels, entitled ‘Stage- 
Land, Curious Habits and Customs of its In- 
habitants.’ Among the many citizens of this 
peculiar place whom Jerome was enterprizing 

138 


THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA 


enough to interview, were the Stage-Hero and 
his fit mate, the Stage-Heroine, the Stage-Villain, 
and the Stage-Adventuress, the Stage-Detective 
and the Stage-Lawyer. 

Mr. Jerome was able to accompany his analysis 
of these peculiar personalities by an account of 
the legislation which governs their conduct and 
which has hitherto been unfamiliar to students 
of comparative jurisprudence. It appears that 
in Stage-Land, when a man dies, without leaving 
a will, then all his property goes to the nearest 
villain. But, if the deceased has left a will, 
then and in that case, all his property goes to the 
person who can get possession of this document. 
As Jerome fails to cite any decisions in support of 
these laws, we are left to infer that they are statu- 
tory and not judge-made. Yet he is frank to 
inform us that he has not been able to ascertain 
the fundamental principles of the jurisprudence 
of Stage-Land, since “fresh acts and clauses and 
modifications appear to be introduced for each 
new play’; and here we discover a condition of 
things closely resembling that which obtains in 
Scribia. 

Yet Stage-Land is not Scribia, altho their 
several populations are apparently descended 
from the same stock. It is in Stage-Land rather 
than in Scribia, that the Missing Will always 
turns up in the nick of time and that all the babes 
are changed at nurse. Nor is Scribia identical, 

139 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


as some geographers seem to have believed, with 
the No Man’s Land in which dwelt the pale per- 
sonages of M. Maeterlinck’s earlier plays, a 
shadowy and mysterious realm where the unsub- 
stantial ‘Intruder’ finds his way invisibly into 
the household of death and where the ‘Sightless’ 
wander aimlessly and hopelessly. Still less is 
Scribia to be confounded with two other coun- 
tries, Utopia and Altruria, about which the gazet- 
teers are able to supply us only with pitiably in- 
sufficient information. There is, however, a 
certain plausibility in the suggestion that 
Scribia has for its capital the city of Weiss-nicht- 
wo and that it has recently rectified its frontiers 
by annexing the contiguous principality of 
Zenda. 

When Brunetiére was bringing to its logical con- 
clusion his illuminating series of lectures on the 
evolution of French dramatic literature, he took 
as the topics for his final talk Scribe and Alfred de 
Musset, contemporary and unlike—Scribe the 
craftsman who was only a craftsman thinking 
solely of the theater and living in it contentedly, 
and Musset the lyrist, careless of formal structure 
and regardless of the narrowing limitations of the 
playhouse. Different as they were in equipment 
and in aim, both of them were wont to take for 
the scene of their dissimilar dramas, emptily 
prosaic in the one case and in the other abundantly 
poetic, the non-existent country, which had been 

140 


THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA 


named after the elder of them, and which was a 
land of fantasy with manners and laws easy to 
manipulate according to the necessities of the 
fables they had taken as the foundations of their 
pieces. Brunetiére did not call Scribia by its 
name; but he did draw the attention of his hearers 
to the ideal Bavaria of Musset’s ‘Fantasio,’ the 
Italy of his ‘Bettine,’ the Sicily of his ‘Carmo- 
sine’ and the Hungary of his ‘ Barberine’—“all 
Shaksperian lands, if I may so call them, in 
which characters from fairy-tales undergo their 
adventures in gardens always in bloom and under 
skies that are eternally blue.” 


Ill 


WHEN Brunetiére ventured to suggest that the 
indeterminate backgrounds of Musset’s ironic 
imaginations might be called Shaksperian, he 
was only recognizing the obvious fact that the 
French lyrist, alone among modern dramatists, 
had chosen to follow in the footsteps of the 
author of ‘As You Like It’ and of ‘Twelfth 
Night.’ From Shakspere Musset borrowed the 
commingling of realistic and prosaic characters 
with characters poetic and romanticized. He 
arbitrarily banisht the persons who people his 
airy fantasies to a far and foreign land chiefly 
that he might let them live in an atmosphere of 
remoteness and enable them to escape from the 

I4I 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


limitations and the rigors of commonplace exist- 
ence in contemporary Paris. So Shakspere, in 
order that an unknown distance from London 
might lend enchantment to the view, had chosen 
to domicile the grave and the gay characters of 
his romantic comedies in a Bohemia which is a 
desert country by the sea and in a Forest of 
Arden where glide gilded snakes and where roam 
lions with udders all drawn dry. 

No doubt Musset scorned Scribe as bitterly as 
did his fellow lyrist, Heine; and he was almost the 
only French dramatist of his day who was not 
tempted to emulate the tricky dexterity of Scribe; 
but none the less do we find many of his creatures 
living in the pleasant land of Scribia—just as 
many of Shakspere’s lighter characters had re- 
sided in the same strange country more than two 
centuries earlier. And while Musset knew about 
Scribe even if he might detest him and all his 
works, Shakspere could have had no foreknowl- 
edge of the prolific French playmaker whose pro- 
ductivity was to manifest itself more than two 
centuries after that of the English dramatist 
had ceased. Still it is difficult to deny that Shak- 
spere, who may never have set foot outside of 
his precious isle set in the silver sea, had let his 
fancy transport him to a territory which we can 
now recognize as the Scribia known to all students 
of the French dramatists of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. 

142 


THE PLEASANT LAND OF SCRIBIA 


It is not from any actual Verona in any actual 
Italy, but from a town of the same name in the 
heart of Scribia, that two gentlemen departed 
one after another, destined to show once more 
that the course of false love does not always 
run smooth. It is in a Scribian and not in an 
Italian Venice, where dwelt a Jewish usurer who 
was trickt out of the deadly forfeit set down in 
his merry bond by the sharp practice of a quick- 
witted woman triumphantly passing herself off 
as a lawyer. In fact, the administration of jus- 
tice in this fabled Venice is so frankly fantastic 
and so completely contrary to all the precedents 
which would govern the courts of any actual 
Venice, that we find ourselves wondering whether 
this imagined city in the sea is situated in Scribia 
or in the adjacent realm of Stage-Land explored 
and described by Mr. Jerome. 

Again it is in Scribia and not in Greece that 
the Athens stood whose Duke wooed and won 
the Queen of the Amazons, while the British-born 
Bottom, after marvelous misadventures due to 
the malice of a fairy King, made ready with his 
mates to perform a lamentable tragedy at the 
ducal bridal ceremony. Where except upon the 
coast of Scribia could we find the Ephesus, the 
laws of which put the obtruding stranger imme- 
diately on trial for his life and the magic atmos- 
phere of which made it possible for twins separated 
in infancy and brought up in widely parted places 

143 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


to be in manhood indistinguishable one from the 
other in speech and even incostume? And where, 
except off the coast of Scribia, could that en- 
chanted isle lie which was full of disheartening 
noises and which was suddenly invaded by a 
ship’s company cast up by the sea as the result 
of an artificial tempest raised by the cunning of 
a royal magician. 

Students of imaginary geography, aware that 
Utopia was discovered and described by More 
in 1516 and that the earliest tidings from Al- 
truria were brought by a traveler interviewed 
by Howells in 1894, have never had occasion to 
question the discovery of Scribia in the first half 
of the nineteenth century, during the lifetime of 
the man from whom it took its name. Yet we 
can now perceive that this pleasant land was not 
unknown to Shakspere in the first half of the 
seventeenth century, and that he profited hugely 
by his information as to its manners, its customs 
and its laws, finding them modifiable to suit his 
convenience. How is this to be explained ? 

After long meditation over all the peculiarities 
of this problem I am emboldened to proffer a 
solution, suggested by the notorious fact that 
history is prone to repeat itself. This solution 
I venture to submit herewith to the charitable 
judgment of experts in imaginary geography. 
Altho Scribia has been a densely populated 
realm since a time whereof the memory of man 

144 


THE PLEASANT. LAND OF SCRIBIA 


runneth not to the contrary, and altho it had 
been visited and traverst and dwelt in by many 
of the characters of Shakspere and a little later 
by not a few of the characters of Beaumont and 
Fletcher, for some inexplicable reason it had 
failed to be described in any gazetteer of liter- 
ature; and at some unknown date it seems to 
have secluded itself and forbidden the entry of 
all foreigners, just as Japan chose to shut itself 
off from the rest of the world. 

After long scores of years it was rediscovered 
by Scribe, colonized by his characters, reintro- 
duced into the community of nations and named 
anew. It is to be regretted that there is never 
any hope of rectifying an error in geographic 
nomenclature; and as this western continent 
will continue to hear the name not of Columbus, 
but of Americus Vespucius, so to the end of time 
will Scribia commemorate the ingenious industry 
of Eugene Scribe, falsely believed to be its original 
discoverer. And here, to companion the lilting 
lyric of Andrew Lang is a copy of verses by 
Charles Godfrey Leland: 


Thru years of toil, Columbus 
Unto our New World came; 
But a charlatan skipt after, 
And gave that world his name. 


All day in street and market 
The liar’s name we see; 
145 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Columbia !—sweet and seldom— 
Is left to Poetry. 


And the names bring back a lesson 
Taught to the world in youth— 
That the realm of Song and Beauty 

Is the only home of Truth. 


(1918.) 


146 


Vill 
‘HAMLET’ WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT* 


I 


N the flotsam and jetsam of theatrical anecdote, 

derived from the wreckage of forgotten books 
of histrionic biography, no tale is more familiar 
than that which records how a strolling company 
playing a one-night stand and unexpectedly 
maimed by the illness of its leading actor, ven- 
tured nevertheless to perform the play it had 
promised with a modification of the original 
advertisement to accord with the unfortunate 
fact. That is to say, the company declared its 
intention of performing “the play of ‘Hamlet’— 
with the part of Hamlet left out.’ 

Despite diligent endeavor I have not been able 
to discover where or when this fabled performance 
was believed to have taken place. Still less suc- 
cessful have I been in my search for one of the 
spectators at this unique representation of Shak- 
spere’s masterpiece. It would be both pleasant 
and profitable if only a single survivor of the 


*This paper was read before the Modern Language 
Association of America, at Columbia University, in 
December, 1914. 


147 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


audience on that occasion could be interrogated 
as to the impression produced upon him by the 
tragedy thus bereft of its central figure. With 
Hamlet himself subtracted, what can be left? 
The scene in which Polonius loads his son with 
excellent advice, the scene of Ophelia’s madness, 
and the scene of the two grave-diggers,—these 
would remain intact, and little more. The rest 
is silence. 

There is perhaps no other play of Shakspere’s 
(not even ‘ Macbeth’) in which the title-part is as 
integrally related to almost every episode of the 
plot as it is in ‘Hamlet.’ It would not be diffi- 
cult to arrange an acting edition of both halves of 
‘Henry IV’ with the part of Henry IV left out, 
for we should still have Prince Hal and Falstaff 
and all their jovial crew. And it would not be 
impossible, altho the feat would demand the 
utmost dramaturgic dexterity, to prepare a 
theatrically effective version of ‘Julius Czesar’ 
with the part of Julius Czsar left out. As a 
matter of fact not a few critics have complained 
that Julius Casar does not bulk big enough in the 
tragedy which bears his name; and by this com- 
plaint these critics revealed that they were un- 
familiar with the custom of the Tudor theater 
which prescribed the giving of the name of the 
sovran to any historical play dealing with his 
times, even if he himself might not be a dominat- 
ing personality in its story. 

148 


‘HAMLET’ WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT 


But even if Julius Cesar and Henry IV are 
not the most important or the most interest- 
ing characters in the plays named after them, 
at least they do take part in the action from time 
to time. They pass across the stage at intervals 
and are seen by the spectators. Neither Shak- 
spere nor any other Elizabethan dramatist ever 
dreamed of so constructing a piece as to center 
attention on an important and interesting char- 
acter who should not be brought bodily on the 
stage. The Tudor relish for the concrete was 
too intense for the playgoers to accept etherial 
subtleties of this sort; and the playwright him- 
self was necessarily the contemporary of the play- 
goers, sharing in their simple tastes and in their 
bold desires. Even the frequent ghosts who 
stalk thru Shakspere’s tragedies were on his 
stage boldly visible specters, white-sheeted and 
gory-throated,—these very ghosts which a stage- 
manager today delicately suggests by ingenious 
scientific devices or less confidently leaves to the 
imagination of the spectators. 

It is curious that the Elizabethan audiences, 
perfectly willing to imagine scenery at the will 
of the author, demanded to see every character 
in the drama, standing on the stage and speaking 
for himself, whereas the spectators of today, 
insisting upon an adequate scenic background for 
every episode of the play are willing enough to 
imagine a character who never appears before 

149 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


their eyes,—an unseen personage who may in- 
deed be more important and more interesting 
than any other personage who actually stands in 
front of them on the stage. 


II 


In a volume of one-act plays composed by a 
young American playwright, George Middleton, 
there is a piece called ‘Their Wife,’ in which the 
most significant figure is that of the woman who 
has been the wife of one man and who is the wife 
of another. The only two characters who are 
seen and heard by the audience are these two 
husbands; their wife does not appear; and yet 
she is the heroine of the play. It is solely because 
she is what she is that the action of the piece is 
possible; and it is her character which is the core 
of the situation wherein the two men find them- 
selves entangled. We do not see her in the flesh, 
but the dramatist has made us see her in the 
spirit. He has interpreted her thru the mouths 
of the two men who have loved her and whom she 
has loved in turn. She is the most clearly de- 
picted person in the play, so clearly depicted, 
indeed, that the spectator realizes her for what 
she is. Oddly enough a little later or a little 
earlier Mr. George Ade had made use of exactly 
the same device in his one-act play ‘Nettie,’ in 
which we are made to see the invisible heroine 

150 


“HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT 


as she has imprest herself on three of her “ gentle- 
men-friends.”’ Quite possibly an average unob- 
servant playgoer, recalling one or the other of 
these plays after an interval of a month or two, 
could discuss its heroine so oblivious of the fact 
that he had not actually seen her, that he might 
find himself endeavoring vainly to remember 
the name of the actress who played the part. 

It is now nearly half-a-century since Sardou 
brought out one of the cleverest of his satiric 
comedies, the ‘Famille Benoiton.’ It dealt 
with the fortunes of a family in the second decade 
of the Second Empire, with its gaudy glitter and 
with its gangrene of social disintegration. Mon- 
sieur and Madame Benoiton have sons and 
daughters, married, marriageable, and not yet 
ripe for matrimony. All the members of the 
family are presented to us in turn, singly and 
together,—all of them except Madame Benoiton. 
They are put thru their paces in a series of amus- 
ing scenes; and we discover slowly that the family 
is in its sorry state, largely because it lacks the 
guiding hand of the mother. Madame Benoiton 
is never at home; she may have just gone out or 
she may be immediately expected; but she does 
not appear with the rest of the family. She is_ 
a woman of fashion, or she aspires so to be con- 
sidered; and her “social duties’’ are too absorb- 
ing for her to give any time to her husband, to 
her sons or to her daughters. 

ISI 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


When at last the fifth act draws to its con- 
clusion, with the reconciliation of the eldest 
daughter to her husband and with the engage- 
ment of the next oldest daughter to an eligible 
bachelor, there is the sound of carriage-wheels 
and a ring at the front door. The youngest 
boy looks out the window, cries “Mamma 1” and 
rushes away to greet her. The eligible bachelor 
smiles with anticipatory delight; he has yet to be 
introduced to his future mother-in-law! Then the 
boy returns disappointed; and when he is askt 
where his mother is, he explains that she has 
just gone out again:—‘She had forgotten her 
parasol !”’ 

Here again quite possibly the average unob- 
servant playgoer, recalling the play after an in- 
terval, might easily fail to remember that he had 
never laid eyes on Madame Benoiton herself, 
altho it was because she was what she was that 
her children had developed into the characters 
set before us. Quite possibly once more Sardou 
himself, intent only upon a characteristically 
clever theatrical trick, did not intend or even 
apprehend the full significance of Madame 
Benoiton’s absence from the home which it was 
her privilege to control. Yet his technical skill 
was sufficient to impress upon us a clear vision 
of this unseen mother, derelict to her duty. 

It deserves to be recorded also that in Al- 
phonse Daudet’s play of Provengal life, ‘L’Arlé- 

152 


“HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT 


sienne,’ the woman of Arles, who is the cause of 
the fatal catastrophe, does not appear before 
the eyes of the spectators. 


ill 


It may not be strictly accurate to say that in 
Ibsen’s ‘Rosmersholm’ the mainspring of the 
action is Beata, Rosmer’s wife, who had thrown 
herself into the stream some time before the 
opening scene of the play. In fact, such an asser- 
tion would be inexact, since it is the scheming of 
Rebecca West which has brought about Beata’s 
suicide. Yet the dead Beata is as determining 
a figure upon the action of ‘Rosmersholm’ as 
the dead Julius Casar is upon that part of the 
action of ‘Julius Czsar’ which follows his as- 
sassination. Here again it is because Beata was 
what she was that the ambition of Rebecca West 
to take her place came so near to fulfilment. 
And it is with marvelous adroitness that Ibsen 
drops the hints and supplies the suggestions here 
and there which we eagerly piece together (much 
as we might work over the once popular puzzle- 
pictures) until at last we are enabled to make out 
a full-length portrait of the dead and gone wife, 
whose gentle spirit is now more potent over the 
volitions of her husband and of the woman who 
aspires to be her successor than it was while 
she was yet on earth to mingle with them, a 

153 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


pale and unobtrusive figure. It is the influence 
emanating from Beata which really inhibits 
Rebecca from the accomplishment of her intent 
to marry Beata’s widower. 

In two of Sir Arthur Pinero’s plays there are 
also dead wives, whose personality reaches for- 
ward and interferes with the orderly march of 
events after their departure from this life. In 
the ‘Second Mrs. Tanqueray’ we are made to 
feel the austere chilliness of the first Mrs. Tan- 
queray, her cold-blooded physical asceticism, 
which ultimately drove the warm-blooded wid- 
ower to ask the equally warm-blooded Paula 
to become his second wife. And in ‘His House 
in Order’ we are presented with a second wife 
tormented by the saintly reputation of the first 
wife, to whose memory everything is sacrificed 
including the happiness of her successor. The 
culminating moment of the play is when the out- 
raged second wife discovers that this saintly rep- 
utation of the first wife was usurpt, since the 
dead woman had been unfaithful. It must be 
admitted that the author has not been as skilful 
or at least not as successful in ‘His House in 
Order’ as in the ‘Second Mrs. Tanqueray’ in 
creating in our minds a distinct impression of the 
unseen woman whose dead hand clutches the 
heart of the action. The first Mrs. Tanqueray 
we can reconstruct sharply enough. But the 
first wife of the man whose house is not in order 

154 


“HAMLET WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT 


remains a rather unsatisfactory shadow, since 
it is a little difficult for us to perceive exactly 
how it was that a woman of her indefensible char- 
acter should have been able to pass as a woman 
of her indisputable reputation. 


IV 


In these two plays by Sir Arthur Pinero as well 
as in the ‘Rosmersholm’ of Ibsen, dead women 
still influence the lives of living men; even tho 
they are dead when the several plays begin, they 
had each of them been alive only a little while 
earlier, a few months or a few years. In one of 
Maeterlinck’s somber pieces, remote from the 
realities and the trivialities of everyday existence, 
there is also a personage unseen by the spectators, 
a personage not dead, since he never had been 
alive in the flesh. 

In the ‘Intruder,’ Maeterlinck invites us to 
behold a dim hall in which a waiting family is 
gathered, grandfather, father, daughters, chil- 
dren—all but the mother who lies in the adjoin- 
ing room, desperately ill and hovering between 
life and death. The conversation between the 
different members of the family is subdued and 
almost in whispers. The blind grandfather hears 
a step in the garden outside;—but nobody has 
come to the gate. A moment later he hears the 
click of the latch of the gate, as if it had opened 

155 


. THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


and shut;—but nobody has past thru. Then 
the old man asks who has entered the room:— 
but nobody has been seen to come in. And as 
query follows query, the spectators begin to 
suspect that the senses of the blind man are super- 
normally acute and that he is conscious of hap- 
penings which the others fail to perceive. The 
dialog is as tense as it is terse; it is all in ques- 
tion and answer; it abounds in seemingly un- 
meaning repetition which the audience feels 
somehow to be strangely significant. There is 
an almost breathless suspense while we wonder 
whether or not there is an invisible visitor and 
while we ask ourselves who this unseen newcomer 
can be. Finally the door of the sick room 
opens and the sister of charity, who has been 
in attendance on the ailing mother, is seen stand- 
ing silent with hands crost over her breast. Then 
at last we know with certainty that there was a 
mysterious visitor and that he was no less a 
person than Death himself. 

Of all Maeterlinck’s dramas the ‘Intruder’ 
is perhaps the simplest in its story as it is the 
strongest in its effect. And the means whereby 
this effect is achieved are seemingly as simple as 
the story itself. But altho the dramatist has 
wisely chosen a primitive and elementary form, 
he reveals his possession of the power to excite 
the imagination and to make the spectators in- 
terpret for themselves what he had refrained from 

156 


‘HAMLET’ WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT 


bringing before their eyes. Often in poetry we 
discover that the part is greater than the whole; 
and in the ‘Intruder’ we perceive that the poet 
has so toucht the chords of our sensibilities that 
we attain to a vision of the whole, altho no part 
has actually been before our eyes. Here is a 
case where M. Maeterlinck was happily inspired, 
lighting on a topic which responded sympathetic- 
ally to his etheriality of treatment. In the in- 
tangible means whereby an indefinable mood is 
evoked and sustained, there is nothing in modern 
literature comparable with the ‘Intruder’— 
except, 1t may be, the ‘Fall of the House of 
Usher,’ where we find the same haunting and 
insistent melancholy, the same twilight paleness, 
the same dread advance of we know not what. 


V 


THE ‘Intruder’ differs from the several plays 
in which there is an absent character in that even 
the most careless and oblivious spectator must 
recall the fact that the grisly invader was not 
seen by anyone either in the auditorium or on 
the stage. In this play we have no true parallel 
to ‘Hamlet’ with the part of Hamlet left out be- 
cause we have been made to feel that Death has 
actually past before us even if our eyes have 
proved too feeble to perceive him. He is a thing 
unseen; yet the accumulated evidence is tga 

157 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


convincing for us to dream of denying his actual 
presence. There is, however, another French 
play in which a character actually alive, altho 
far distant, is the motive force of the action of a 
play wherein he has not appeared and in which 
his name is only casually mentioned. 

This is the ‘Death of the Duke of Enghien’ 
by Léon Hénnique, a brief tragedy in three swift 
episodes. In the first we are shown the head- 
quarters of the French general in command at 
Strasburg; and to him an officer brings orders 
for a raid into neutral territory to capture the 
Duke. The obedient general does not discuss 
or dispute this command; but the spectators 
feel that he does not approve it. In the second 
part we see the Duke at Ettenheim, in the 
midst of his little court. While they are at table, 
the house is surrounded by the French cavalry. 
The general enters and arrests the Duke by the 
order of the French First Consul. In the third 
scene we behold the sitting of the court-martial 
in a dilapidated room in the castle of Vincennes. 
There are no witnesses against the Duke, no in- 
criminating papers, no counsel for the defense: 
yet these things are disregarded without com- 
ment. The Duke is summoned and interrogated 
with the utmost courtesy. He scorns to deny 
that he has fought against the Republic. There- 
upon the members of the military tribunal with- 
draw to deliberate—but the spectators are never 

158 


‘HAMLET’ WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT 


in doubt as to the fatal verdict. In time the 
Duke drops off to sleep, to be awakened by an 
officer who bids him summon his courage and 
follow. When he has gone the audience over- 
hears the sentence read to him as he stands in 
the moat below the open window. Then comes 
the order to fire, and with the rattle of musketry 
the curtain slowly descends. 

Nothing can be barer than the dialog of this 
drama; it achieves the acme of directness; and 
in the trial scene almost every word is derived 
from the official report. The name of the First 
Consul is not brought in; and yet the author 
has made the spectators feel that it is the steel 
volition of Napoleon which commands every 
movement and which dictates every word. It 
is a duel to the death between the two, the cap- 
tive whom we behold and the implacable usurper 
who overrules justice to destroy a man he wishes 
out of the way. It is a duel of an unarmed man 
with an unseen opponent, for the final thrust of 
whose long rapier there is no possible parry.~ 
Napoleon pervades the whole play from the be- 
ginning to the end; he is the hero-villain; his 
iron will is the mainspring of the action; and we 
cannot fail to feel this altho he never comes be- 
fore us and altho no one dares to bring in his 
name. 

In the ‘Marion Delorme’ of Victor Hugo it is 
the inflexible determination of Richelieu which 

159 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


controls the action. Altho the Cardinal is never 
seen, yet he is heard to utter a single word, 
“No!” from behind the curtains of his litter as 
he is borne across the stage in the final act. 
In Hénnique’s play Napoleon is neither seen nor 
heard, nor is his name bandied about as is Riche- 
lieu’s in Hugo’s drama. Surely here at last is a 
novelty in the drama: here is really an analog 
to the performance of ‘Hamlet’ with the part 
of Hamlet left out. Still the student of the 
stage will not readily admit that any novelty is 
possible at this late date in the long history of 
the theater; and with no very great difficulty 
he can recall at least one drama in which there 
is a single combat between a character whom the 
spectators can see and sympathize with and an 
unseen personality of inflexible determination. 
The ‘Death of the Duke of Enghien’ is compara- 
tively recent, since it was acted in Paris in the 
later years of the nineteenth century; and yet 
it was anticipated in Athens more than two thou- 
sand years ago by the earliest of the Greek 
dramatic poets. 

In the ‘Prometheus Bound’ of fEschylus the 
play begins with the rivetting of Prometheus to 
the rock in accord with the command of Zeus, 
because he will not tell what the god wants to 
know. Zeus is determined to force this secret 
from Prometheus; and Prometheus is equally 
firm in his resolution to keep it to himself, no 

160 


‘HAMLET’ WITH HAMLET LEFT OUT 


matter how keen the torture to which he may be 
condemned or how prolonged the agony. To 
Prometheus chained to the crags of the Caucasus 
other characters come, one after another, some to 
encourage him in resistance and some to urge 
him to yield since resistance is ultimately in vain. 
Altho Zeus does not come the spectators are well 
aware that it is his unbending volition which is 
responsible for the situation. Prometheus may 
vaunt himself to be the master of his fate and 
captain of his soul; he may steel his will to with- 
stand every outrage; but his invisible opponent 
has a long arm and a sharp sword in his hand. 
In the utilization of the device of the unseen duel- 
list, the obvious difference between the ‘ Death of 
the Duke of Enghien’ and ‘Prometheus Bound’ 
lies in the sublety of the later dramatist whereby 
ne gets his effect without even allowing any of 
the characters to allege the name of Napoleon, 
whereas /Eschylus causes all his characters to 
discuss the deeds and the misdeeds of Zeus, and 
he permits Prometheus to exhale his griefs 
against the hostile god as often as occasion oc- 
curs. There is this further difference also, 
that M. Hénnique is a sophisticated Parisian 
who was deliberately achieving his effect by 
conscious art, whereas AZschylus was a reverent 
spirit not condescending to artistic subtleties of 
this sort, even if they had been possible in the 
primitive conditions of the Attic theater, when 
161 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


tragedies were presented before ten thousand 
spectators sitting or standing, tier on tier, on the 
curving hillside of the Acropolis. 


(1914.) 


162 


IX 
SITUATIONS WANTED 


I 


N a forgotten book by a forgotten British bard, 
in the ‘Gillot and Goosequill’ of Henry S. 
Leigh, we may read the appealing plaint of a play- 
wright who felt that his invention was failing 
and who could no longer find the succession of 
poignant episodes that the drama demands :— 


Ten years I’ve workt my busy brain 
In drama for the million; 

I don’t aspire to Drury Lane, 
Nor stoop to the Pavilion. 

I’ve sought materials low and high 
To edify the nation; 

At last the fount is running dry— 
I want a situation. 


I’ve known the day when wicked earls 
Who made improper offers 
To strictly proper village girls, 
Could fill a house’s coffers. 
The lowly peasant could create 
A wonderful sensation. 
Such people now are out of date— 
| want a situation. 
163 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


The writer of these despondent stanzas had had 
a hand in a play or two but he was by profession 
a lyrist and not a dramatist; and it may be 
doubted whether any of the born playwrights 
would ever have sent forth this cry of distress, 
since fecundity is a necessary element in their 
endowment. The major dramatic poets have 
always been affluent in their productivity; Soph- 
ocles and Shakspere and Moliére appear to 
have averaged two plays in every year of their 
ripe maturity. It is true, of course, that they 
had no scruple in taking their material wherever 
they might find it, not only despoiling their pre- 
decessors of single situations, but on occasion 
helping themselves to a complete plot, ingeniously 
invented and adroitly constructed and needing 
only to be transformed and transfigured by their 
interpreting imagination. 

We like to think that in these modern days our 
dramatists are more conscientious in the acquisi- 
tion of their raw material, and that they can with- 
stand the temptation to appropriate an entire 
plot or even a ready-made situation. When 
Sardou was scientifically interrogated by a 
physiological psychologist as to his methods of 
composition he evidently took pleasure in declar- 
ing that he had in his notebooks dozens of 
skeleton stories needing only to be articulated 
a little more artfully and then to be clothed with 
words. Probably no one of the playwrights of 

164 


SITUATIONS WANTED 


the second half of the nineteenth century was 
more fertile in invention than Sardou; and not 
a few effective situations originally devised by 
him have been utilized by playmakers in other 
countries,—one from “La Haine’ for instance in 
the ‘Conquerors’ and one from ‘La Tosca’ in 
the ‘Darling of the Gods.’ Notwithstanding 
this notorious originality Sardou was frequently 
accused of levying on the inventions of others, 
without recompense or even acknowledgment; 
and more than once the accusers caught him “with 
the goods on him’’—if this expressive phrase is 
permissible. ‘Les Pommes du Voisin,’ for ex- 
ample, was traced to a story of Charles de Ber- 
nard’s; ‘Fernande’ to a tale of Diderot’s; and 
‘Fédora’ to a novel of Adolphe Bélot’s. As it 
happened Bélot had dramatized his novel, and 
when he saw that Sardou had borrowed and 
bettered his plot, he made no outcry; he con- 
tented himself with arranging for a revival of his 
play, so that the similarity of its story to Sardou’s 
might be made immediately manifest. 

When Mario Uchard asserted that the domi- 
nant situation in his ‘La Fiammina’ had been 
lifted by Sardou for service in ‘Georgette,’ Sar- 
dou retorted by citing three or four earlier pieces 
and stories in which an identical situation could 
be found. Those who seek equity must come 
into court with clean hands; so Uchard lost his 
case. Nevertheless the impression left upon at 

165 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


least one reader of the testimony was that Uchard 
had no knowledge of the forgotten fictions which 
Sardou disinterred, that he believed himself 
to be the inventor of the situation in dispute, and 
that Sardou probably did derive it from Uchard, 
—altho quite possibly he may have invented it 
independently. 

The fact is indisputable that the number of 
situations fit for service on the stage is not in- 
finite but rigorously restricted. Gozzi declared 
that there were only thirty-six; and when Goethe 
and Schiller sought to ascertain these, they could 
not fill out the list. Georges Polti accepted 
Gozzi’s. figure and after indefatigable investiga- 
tion of several thousand plays, ancient and 
modern, he catalogued the three dozen with all 
their available corollaries. Of course scientific 
certainty is not attainable in such a counting up; 
there may be fifty-seven varieties or even ninety 
and nine. The playwrights of this generation 
have to grind the grist already ground by their 
predecessors a generation earlier; they may bor- 
row boldly, that is to say, they may be aware that 
what they are doing has been done before, or 
they may be innocently original, fondly believing 
themselves to be the inventors of a novel pre- 
dicament and unaware that it was second-hand a 
score of centuries before they were born. Their 
good faith can not fairly be denied, even if their 
originality can be disproved. 

166 


SITUATIONS WANTED 


There is the Romeo and Juliet situation, for 
instance,—the course of true love made to run 
rough by the bitter hostility of the parents. We 
can find it in ‘Huckleberry Finn’ in the nine- 
teenth century, and we can also find it in the 
‘Antigone,’ more than two thousand years earlier; 
and we may rest assured that Mark Twain did 
not go to Sophocles for it, or even to Shakspere. 
It is probably to be found in the fiction of every 
language, dead and alive; and those who employ 
it now do so without giving a thought to any of 
its many earlier users. The theme is common 
property, to be utilized at will by anybody any- 
where and anywhen. 


II 


Durinc the run of the ‘Chorus Lady’ in New 
York I happened to call the attention of Bronson 
Howard to the identity of its culminating situa- 
tion with that in ‘Lady Windemere’s Fan.’ A 
young woman foolishly adventures herself in the 
apartment of a man, whereupon an older woman 
goes there to rescue her; then when the younger 
woman is summoned to come out of the inner 
room in which she has taken refuge, it 1s the older 
woman who appears, thus placing herself in a 
compromising position in the eyes of the man 
whom she is expecting to marry. “Don’t forget 
that I had had it in ‘One of Our Girls,’’? Howard 
remarkt, without in any way suggesting that 

167 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Oscar Wilde had despoiled him, or that James 
Forbes had lifted the situation from either of 
his predecessors. Then I recalled that I had 
seen it in an unacted play, ‘Faith,’ by H. C. 
Bunner, the story of which he had taken as the 
basis of a novel entitled, “A Woman of Honor.’ 
Knowing Bunner and Howard intimately, I felt 
certain that they had no doubt as to their right 
to utilize this situation, and that if either of 
them had been conscious of any indebtedness to 
any specific predecessor he would have declared 
it frankly. 

Bronson Howard, on the playbill of the ‘ Henri- 
etta,’ acknowledged the borrowing of a situation 
from ‘Vanity Fair’; he was compelled to this 
confession because in this case he happened to 
know where he had found the situation. He 
was aware that it was borrowed, and not his own 
invention. A confession equally complete and 
of a somewhat larger import is to be found in 
the Author’s Note prefixt to Maeterlinck’s play, 
“Marie Magdeleine’: 

“] have borrowed from M. Paul Heyse’s drama, 
‘Maria von Magdala,’ the idea of two situations 
in my play, namely at the end of the first act, 
the intervention of Christ, who stops the crowd 
raging against Mary Magdalene, with these words, 
spoken behind the scenes: ‘He that is without 
sin among you let him cast the first stone’; and 
in the third the dilemma (in which the great sinner 

168 


SITUATIONS WANTED 


finds herself) of saving or destroying the Son of 
God, according as she consents or refuses to give 
herself to a Roman. Before setting to work, | 
askt the venerable German poet, whom | hold in 
the highest esteem, for his permission to develop 
those two situations, which, so to speak, were 
merely sketcht in his play, with its incomparably 
richer plot than mine; and offered to recognize 
his rights in whatever manner he thought proper. 
My respectful request was answered with a re- 
fusal, none too courteous, I regret to say, and al- 
most threatening. From that moment, | was 
bound to consider that the words from the Gospel 
quoted above are common property; and that the 
dilemma of which I speak is one of those which 
occur pretty frequently in dramatic literature. 
It seemed to me the more lawful to make use of 
it inasmuch as [ had happened to imagine it in 
the fourth act of ‘Joyzelle’ in the same year in 
which ‘Maria von Magdala’ was publisht and 
before I was able to become acquainted with that 
play.” 

Then the Belgian poet declared that, except in 
so far as these two situations were concerned, his 
play had absolutely nothing in common with the 
German drama. “Having said this,’ Maeter- 
linck concluded, “I am happy to express to the 
aged master my gratitude for an intellectual 
benefit, which is not the less great for being 
involuntary.” 

169 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


This note calls for two comments. The first 
is that altho the words from the Gospel are com- 
mon property, still it was Heyse who first ap- 
plied them to Mary Magdalene; and the second 
is that altho the dilemma that Maeterlinck wanted 
to borrow from ‘Maria von Magdala’ was one 
that he had already imagined in ‘ Joyzelle’ and one 
that could be found not infrequently in earlier 
plays, notably in ‘La Tosca’ of Sardou, in the 
“Dame aux Camélias’ of the younger Dumas and 
in the ‘Marion Delorme’ of Victor Hugo, still 
it was Heyse who first had the happy thought of 
forcing this dilemma upon Mary Magdalene. 
When the Belgian poet persisted in making his 
profit out of these two situations of the German 
story-teller, he may have seemed to some rather 
high-handed in his forcible rectification of his 
frontier by the annexation of territory already 
profitably occupied by his neighbor. To this, 
it is only fair to answer that the application of 
the Gospel words and the propounding of this 
special dilemma to Mary Magdalene were so na- 
tural as to be almost necessary, if her story was 
to be shaped for the stage and sustained by a 
satisfactory struggle. They are so natural and 
so necessary that Maeterlinck might almost 
have been expected to invent them for himself 
if he had not found them already invented by 
Heyse. 


170 


SITUATIONS WANTED 


Ill 


Bronson Howarp would have held that 
Maeterlinck was absolutely within his right in 
taking over from Herr Heyse what was necessary 
for the improvement of his own play, if only he 
declared the indebtedness honestly and if he 
offered to pay for it. And no playwright was 
ever more scrupulous in acknowledging his own 
indebtedness than Howard. ‘The situation which 
he took from ‘Vanity Fair’ for use in the ‘Hen- 
rietta’ he might have invented easily enough or 
he might have found it in half-a-dozen other 
places besides Thackeray’s novel; but as he was 
aware that it had been suggested to him by 
Thackeray’s novel, he simply had to say so,— 
just as, many years earlier, on the playbill of his 
‘Moorcroft,’ he had credited the suggestion of its 
plot to a story by John Hay, altho this source 
was so remote that Hay was able to say to me 
that he never would have suspected it except for 
the note on the program. 

When I assert that Howard might easily enough 
have invented for himself the situation he bor- 
rowed from Thackeray | am supported by my 
own experience. | invented that situation, 
quite forgetful of the fact that I must once have 
been familiar with it in ‘Vanity Fair’; and | 
made it the center of a one-act comedy, ‘This 
Picture and That,’ written almost simultaneously 

171 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


with the ‘Henrietta.’ Only after the perform- 
ance of my little piece and only when I saw 
Howard’s play with its note of acknowledgment 
to Thackeray, did I feel called upon to doubt 
my own originality. A few years thereafter | 
had the pleasure and the profit of collaborating 
with Howard in the composition of ‘Peter Stuy- 
vesant, Governor of New Amsterdam,’ and when 
we were still engaged in the arduous and delight- 
ful task of putting together our plot, of setting 
our characters upright upon their feet and of 
seeking situations in which they might reveal 
themselves effectively, I chanced to suggest that 
we might perhaps utilize a situation in a certain 
French drama. I find that I have now for- 
gotten the situation and the title of the play in 
which it appeared. | made the suggestion doubt- 
fully, as its acceptance might lay us open to the 
accusation of plagiarism. 

Howard promptly waved aside my scruples by 
a declaration of principle:-—“ When I am at work 
on a play,” he explained, “my duty as an artist 
is to make that play just as good as I can, to 
construct it as perfectly as possible no matter 
where | get my materials. If this situation you 
suggest is one which will help our play, we should 
take it without hesitation. Our scenario is cer- 
tain to be greatly modified before we are satisfied 
with it and ready to begin on the actual writing; 
and very likely we shall find that this borrowed 

172 


SITUATIONS WANTED 


situation which today seems to us helpful will 
not survive to the final revision; it may have led 
us to something finer and then itself disappeared. 
But if, when the play is done at last, we are face 
to face with the fact that one of our situations 
came to us from somebody else,—then, our duty 
as honest men begins. We must give due credit 
on the playbill when the piece is performed and 
in the book when it is publisht. Furthermore, if 
the somebody from whom we have borrowed is 
alive, if he has rights either legal or moral, we 
must secure his permission, paying whatever may 
be necessary.” 

Bronson Howard was as candid as he was 
clear-eyed; and the principle he declared is one 
by which every dramatist would do well to govern 
himself. If a playwright should be exceedingly 
scrupulous and seek to avoid the use of any situa- 
tion invented and utilized by any one of his 
predecessors in the long history of playmaking, 
he would soon find himself at a standstill and in 
a blind alley; he would discover speedily that 
unused situations are very scarce. The play- 
wright must perforce resign himself to the em- 
ployment of those which have already seen ser- 
vice. Where there is specific obligation he should 
acknowledge it frankly,—unless indeed the bor- 
rowed situation is so well known that acknowl- 
edgment may seem a work of supererogation. It 
is instantly obvious that the ‘Rantzau’ of Erck- 

173 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


mann-Chatrian is an Alsatian ‘Romeo and 
Juliet’ and that the ‘André Cornélis’ of Paul 
Bourget is a Parisian ‘Hamlet’;—these resem- 
blances were so very evident that they could 
not be denied and therefore need not be declared. 


iv 


WITH characteristic wisdom and with a liber- 
ality as characteristic, Goethe held that what was 
really important was not where a situation came 
from but what use was made of it. He noted 
that Scott had helpt himself to a situation from 
‘Egmont,’ and “because he did it well, he de- 
serves praise.” We may be sure that Goethe 
would have only commendation for the skill with 
which the Jacobean playwrights despoiled the 
Spanish stage, because these gifted Englishmen 
always bettered what they borrowed. In his 
illuminating little book on the Spanish drama, 
George Henry Lewes called attention to the 
imaginative energy with which Fletcher in the 
“Custom of the Country,’ transformed an in- 
geniously contrived situation in Calderon’s 
“Mejor esta que Estaba’ into a superbly dra- 
matic scene. 

In the Spanish piece, Don Carlos rushes in 
and begs Flora to conceal him and save his life. 
She has no sooner hidden him than his pur- 
suers enter,—to tell her that they have followed 

174 


SITUATIONS WANTED 


into the house a cavalier who has just killed her 
cousin. She keeps her promise to protect the 
hidden fugitive; and she tells those who are 
seeking him that he sprang from the window into 
the garden and so escaped. This is an effective 
scene; but it is infinitely inferior to that made 
out of it by Fletcher (possibly aided by Mas- 
singer). Donna Guiomar is alone in her bed cham- 
ber; she is anxious about her absent son and she 
kneels in prayer. Rutilio rushes in. He is a 
stranger, 


a most unfortunate stranger, 
That, called unto it by my enemy’s pride, 
Have left him dead in the streets. Justice pur- 
sues me, 
And for that life I took unwillingly, 
And in a fair defense, | must lose mine, 
Unless you, in your charity, protect me. 
Your house is now my sanctuary! 


Donna Guiomar agrees to shelter him and bids 
him hide himself in the hangings of her bed, 
saying 

Be of comfort; 
Once more I give my promise for your safety. 
All men are subject to such accidents, 
Especially the valiant ;—and who knows not, 
But that the charity I afford this stranger, 
My only son elsewhere may stand in need of. 
175 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Then enter officers and servants with a bier 
whereupon a body lies lifeless; and a servant 
declares that 

Your only son, 
My lord Duarte’s slain! 


And an officer explains that 


his murderer, 
Pursued by us, was by a boy discovered 
Entering your house. 


The noble mother, stricken to the heart, is true 
to her promise. She tells the officers to go forth 
and search for the murderer. Then at last 
when she is left alone with the corpse of her son, 
she orders the concealed slayer to make his es- 
cape:— 


Come fearless forth! But let thy face be cov- 
erd, 
That I hereafter be not forc’d to know thee! 


This is an incomparable example of the deep 
difference between the theatrically effective and 
the truly dramatic,—between adroit story-telling 
on the stage for the sake of the story itself, and 
story-telling for the sake of the characters in- 
volved in the situation. The incident invented 
by Calderon is ingenious and it provides a shock 

176 


SITUATIONS WANTED 


of surprise and a thrill of suspense; but how much 
richer and nobler is the situation as Fletcher im- 
proved it, and how superbly did he phrase the 
motive and the emotion of the stricken mother! 
The Jacobean poet achieved surprise and sus- 
pense and also a larger significance, because he 
had imagination to project the scene as a whole, 
to prepare it, to express its ultimate value, and to 
end it to the keen satisfaction of the spectators. 


V 


THE younger Dumas, a playmaker of surpris- 
ing skill, was once persuaded to rewrite a play 
by Emile de Girardin, the ‘Supplice d’une 
Femme. The original author protested that 
he could not recognize his drama in the new 
version. Dumas explained that the original 
play had been cast aside because it was a poor 
piece of work, quite impossible on the stage. But 
it had a central situation which Dumas declared 
to be very interesting and very dramatic; and 
therefore Dumas had written a new play to pre- 
sent this novel and powerful situation so as to 
make it effective in the theater, which was pre- 
cisely what Girardin had been incapable of doing, 
altho he had himself invented the situation. 

“But a situation is not an idea,’’ Dumas ex- 
plained in the article in which he justified his 
rejection of Girardin’s plot and construction. 

177 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


“An idea has a beginning, a middle and an end, 
——an exposition, a development and a con- 
clusion. Anybody may happen on a dramatic 
situation; but it must be prepared for; it must 
be made possible and acceptable; and above all 
the knot must be untied logically.” Then 
Dumas illustrated these assertions by suggesting 
the kind of dramatic situation which anybody 
might happenon. A young man falls in love with 
a girl; he asks her hand; and they are married. 
Then, and only then, at the very moment when 
he is about to bear her away to their future home, 
he learns categorically that he has married his 
own sister. “There’s a situation! and very in- 
teresting indeed. But how are you going to get 
out of it? 1 give you a thousand guesses—and 
then | give you the situation itself, if you want it. 
He who can start with this and make a good play 
out of it, will be the real author of that play, and 
| shall claim no share in it.” 

The situation, around which Girardin had 
written the ‘Supplice d’une Femme,’ was difficult 
and it was dangerous; but it was not impossible. 
Dumas was able to find a way out and to bestow 
upon the story an attractive exposition, a highly 
emotional development and a conclusion at once 
logical and acceptable to a profitable succession 
of audiences. And this is just what one of the 
establisht American dramatists was able to do re- 
cently for a novice who had happened on a strong 

178 


SITUATIONS WANTED 


and striking situation. The piece in which the 
*prentice playwright had put his situation was 
promptly rejected by all the managers, until at 
last in despair he went to the older dramatist for 
advice. He had put his powerful situation in the 
first act, so that it was inadequately prepared 
for while its superior weight prevented his giving 
to the later acts the increasing force which later 
acts ought to possess. The remedy suggested by 
the more experienced dramatist was simple; it 
was to begin and to end the story earlier— 
to cancel the original second and third acts, and 
to compose a new first and second act to lead up 
to the strong and striking situation, which could 
then be amply developt in the new third and 
last act to be made out of the material in the 
original first act. 


VI 


In ‘Rupert of Hentzau,’ the sequel to the 
‘Prisoner of Zenda,’ there is a superb situation 
which needed to be solved and which cried aloud 
for poetic treatment. Rudolph Rassendyll looks 
almost exactly like the King of Ruritania. In the 
‘Prisoner of Zenda’ circumstances force him to 
take the King’s place and to be crowned in his 
stead; so it is that he meets the King’s cousin, 
the Princess Flavia, and falls in love with her 
and she with him. In ‘Rupert of Hentzau’ we 
find that the Princess for reasons of state has 

179 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


married her cousin; and then circumstances 
again force Rassendyll to personate the King, 
who is suddenly murdered and his body burnt. 
What is Rassendyll to doP Shall he accept the 
throne and take with it the Queen who loves 
him and whom he loves? The Queen begs him 
to do this for her sake. If he decides to profit 
by this series of accidents, then he must, for the 
rest of his life, live a lie, knowing that he is hold- 
ing that to which he has no right, legal or moral. 

Here is the stuff out of which serious drama is 
made; here is one of the great passionate crises 
of existence, when, in Stevenson’s phrase, “duty 
and inclination come nobly to the grapple.” 
Here is an ethical dilemma demanding a large 
and lofty poetic treatment,—like that which 
Fletcher bestowed on the situation he borrowed 
from Calderon. Unfortunately the author of 
the story was unable to rise to this exalted alti- 
tude; and he got out of the complication by a tame 
device, which simply dodged the difficulty. Be- 
fore the hero can declare his decision, he is as- 
sassinated. The author had happened on a fine 
situation; he was adroit in his exposition of it 
and in his development; but he failed to find a 
fit conclusion. 

Perhaps, in the course of time, when the hour 
strikes for a rebirth of the poetic drama, a drama- 
tist of a later generation,—a poet who is truly 
a playwright and a playwright who is really a 

180 


SITUATIONS WANTED 


poet,—will be tempted to take over this situation 
invented by the ingenious novelist; and he may 
be able to discover a satisfactory conclusion and 
to treat it with the interpreting imagination it 
demands. 


(1917.) 


=81 


X 
THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER 


I 


N one of his essays Robert Louis Stevenson 

discust the technic of style; and he felt it 
necessary to begin by apologizing and by ad- 
mitting that to the average man there is nothing 
more disenchanting “than to be shown the springs 
and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occu- 
pations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the 
surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, 
and significance; and to pry below is to be 
appalled by their emptiness and shockt by the 
coarseness of the strings and pulleys.” He in- 
sisted that most of us dislike all explanations of 
artistic method, on the principle laid down in 
“Hudibras’ :-— 


Still the less they understand 
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand. 


No doubt, this is true of the majority, who are 
delighted by the result of the conjuror’s skill and 
prefer not to have its secret revealed to them. 
But it is not true of a minority who are ever 

182 


THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER 


eager to discover the devices whereby the marvel 
has been wrought; and it is this minority who 
constitute the insiders, so to speak, so far as that 
art is concerned, the majority being content to be 
forever outsiders ignorant of the technical diffi- 
culties and the technical dangers which the artist 
has triumphantly overcome. The insider, the 
expert, the artist himself, the critic of wise pene- 
tration, is ever intensely interested in technic,— 
as Stevenson himself testified in another essay: 
“A technicality is always welcome to the ex- 
pert, whether in athletics, art or law; I have heard 
the best kind of talk on technicalities from such 
rare and happy persons as both know and love 
their business.” 

It is a sign of the constantly increasing interest 
in the drama that more and more theatergoers 
are showing an eager desire to understand the 
secrets of the two allied arts of the theater,— 
the art of the playmaker and the art of the player, 
each dependent upon the other, each incapable 
of exercise without the aid of the other. The 
work of the author can be revealed completely 
only by the work of the actor; and the actor can 
do nothing unless the author gives him something 
to do. The dramaturgic art and the histrionic 
art are interdependent; they are Siamese twins, 
bound by a tie of flesh and blood. They can 
quarrel, as perhaps Chang and Eng may have had 
their fraternal disagreements; but they can 

183 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


separate only under the penalty of a double 
death. At every hour of their joint existence 
they have to consider and to serve one another, 
whatever their jealousies may be. 

It is true that there have been periods when 
acting flourisht and the drama languisht, as in 
the midyears of the nineteenth century in Great 
Britain and the United States. Yet in these 
decades the performer unprovided with profitable 
parts by the playwrights of his own time, was 
able to find what he needed in the plays of the 
past, in which moreover he could experience the 
keen pleasure of measuring himself with the mem- 
ory of the foremost performers of the preceding 
generation. John Philip Kemble cared little for 
new parts in new plays; and it was said of him 
that he thought all the good parts had already 
been written. Edwin Booth was content with 
the characters that Shakspere had created; and 
Joseph Jefferson found in one of Sheridan’s come- 
dies a character he preferred to any of those in 
the countless modern plays which aspiring authors 
were forever pestering him to produce. 

It needs to be noted however that there is 
danger to the drama in these periods when the 
actor is supreme and when he feels at liberty to 
revise the masterpieces of the past in accord 
with his own whim and perhaps in compliance 
with his own self-esteem. Jefferson was both 
skilful and tactful in his rearrangement of the 

184 


THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER 


‘Rivals’; he added but little of his own and what 
he omitted was little loss. None the less was 
there a certain justice in the gibe of his cousin, 
William Warren, to the effect that however de- 
lightful Jefferson’s Bob Acres might be, it left 
“Sheridan twenty miles away.” Far less ex- 
cusable was Macready’s violent condensation of 
the ‘Merchant of Venice’ into a mere Shylock 
piece, omitting the final act at Belmont and end- 
ing with the trial scene. 

It is in these periods of dramatic penury that 
the actor is able to usurp an undue share of popu- 
lar attention. In periods of dramatic productiv- 
ity his importance is less unduly magnified; and 
even if plays are written specially for him, they 
are rarely mere vehicles for the display of his 
histrionic accomplishment; most of them are 
solidly constructed works of art, in which the 
character he is to personate is kept in its proper 
proportion to the others. A playwright willing 
to manufacture a piece which is only a vehicle 
for an actor is humbling himself to be the domestic 
of the practitioner of the sister art. But the 
dramatist who is not eager to profit by the special 
gifts of the foremost actors, who are his con- 
temporaries and his comrades, is simply neglecting 
his obvious opportunities. 


185 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Il 


IT is a credit and not a discredit to Sophocles 
and to Shakspere, to Moliére and to Racine, to 
Sheridan and to Augier that they made use of the 
possibilities they perceived in the performers of 
their own time. It may be a discredit to Sar- 
dou that he wrote a series of effective but false 
melodramas for Sarah-Bernhardt, not because 
he composed these plays for her, but because 
they were unworthy of him. It was not a dis- 
credit to Rostand that he put together “Cyrano 
de Bergerac’ and ‘L’Aiglon’ and ‘Chantecler,’ 
one after another, in order that the dominant 
character in each should be impersonated by the 
incomparably versatile Coquelin, because in com- 
posing them for this comedian the author did 
not subordinate himself; because he did not sacri- 
fice a play to a part; and because he was not con- 
tent, as Sardou had been, to make a whole play 
out of a single part. 

To those who had followed the career of this 
comedian it was obvious that ‘Cyrano de Berge- 
rac’ had been written not only for Coquelin but 
around him, in order to let him display in one 
piece as many as possible of the facets of his 
genius already disclosed in a host of other plays. 
It was equally evident that ‘Chantecler,’ with all 
its lyric exuberance, was also a play tailor-made 
for the brilliant comedian with the clarion voice, 

186 


THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER 


who could be both vivacious and pathetic. It is 
even possible that the first suggestion of this 
barnyard fantasy may be found in the fact that 
the comedian was in the habit of signing his notes 
to his intimates with the single syllable “Coq.” 

But it is likely to surprize those who remember 
that the part of the ‘Eaglet’ was written for Sarah- 
Bernhardt and that Coquelin did not appear in the 
play when it was originally performed, to learn 
that none the less was it begun with the sole in- 
tention of providing him with a congenial char- 
acter. Yet such is the case, as Coquelin told me 
himself. 

As he and Rostand were leaving one of the final 
rehearsals of ‘Cyrano,’ the poet said to the 
player, “this is not going to be the last piece that 
I shall write for you, of course. Tell me now, 
what kind of a character do you want P”’ 

And Coquelin answered politely that he would 
be delighted to produce any piece that Rostand 
might bring him. 

“No, no,” returned the author; “that is all 
very well; but what I’d like to do is to write a 
play specifically for you, and to please you. Isn’t 
there some character which you have always 
longed to impersonate and which has never come 
your way?” 

Coquelin thought for a moment and then he 
admitted that there was one type which he had 
not attempted and which he had often wisht to 

187 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


act. This was an aging veteran of Napoleon’s 
armies, who had followed the Little Corporal in 
all his campaigns from Egypt to Russia,—the 
type depicted in Raffet’s sketches, the type famil- 
larly known as “the old grumbler of the Em- 
pire,” le vieux grognard de l’Empire. 

“Excellent!” cried Rostand. “Excellent! | 
shall set to work on it as soon as we get ‘Cyrano’ 
out of the way.” 

If this was the starting point of ‘L’Aiglon,’ 
how was it that the play was written for Sarah- 
Bernhardt and not for Coquelin? And to find 
the answer to this we must go into the workshop 
of the dramatist. If the old soldier of Napoleon 
is to be the central figure of the play, then Na- 
poleon himself must not appear in the piece, since 
the Emperor was a personality so overmastering 
that he could not be made a subordinate in the 
story. Therefore the action must take place 
after Napoleon’s exile and death. Yet, after all, 
the old soldier is devoted to Napoleon; and if he 
is to be interesting on the stage, he must be a man 
of action, strong-willed, resolute and ingenious; 
he must be engaged in a plot intimately related 
to Napoleon. It is well known that after the 
return of the Bourbons the Bonapartists were 
speedily disaffected and that there were several 
intrigues to restore the empire with Napoleon’s 
son as Emperor. 

Thus Rostand was led irresistibly to the little 

188 


THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER 


King of Rome, an exile in Austria living almost in 
captivity with his Austrian mother. And then 
all the possibilities of the pale and pathetic 
profile of the Eaglet disclosed themselves to 
Rostand one after another; and from the old 
soldier planning to put his master’s son on his 
master’s throne the poet’s interest shifted to the 
young prince, in whom there were resemblances 
to ‘Richard II’ and to ‘Hamlet.’ So the Duke 
of Reichstadt became the hero of the piece and 
took the center of the stage. Yet the old soldier 
Flambeau still occupied Rostand’s mind and 
he was allowed to occupy a wholly disproportion- 
ate space in the play. In the plot of ‘L’Aiglon’ 
as it was finally elaborated, Flambeau ought to 
have been only one of a host of accessory char- 
acters revolving around the feeble and weak-willed 
prince crusht beneath a responsibility far be- 
yond his capacity. 


III 


WHEN Jules Lemaitre, as the critic of the Dé- 
bats, was called on to comment upon his own com- 
edy, ‘L’Age Difficile,’ he contented himself with 
telling his readers how he came to write the play 
and with describing the successive steps of its 
inception, growth, and composition. The excit- 
ing cause was the suggestion that he should pre- 
pare a piece for Coquelin. Naturally he was de- 
lighted at the possibility of having so accom- 

189 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


plisht an interpreter for the chief character of the 
play he might write; and his invention was in- 
stantly set in motion. As an actor is likely to be 
most effective when he is least made up, Lemaitre 
started with Coquelin as a man of about forty- 
five or fifty; and this led him to consider the 
special dangers of that period in a man’s life. 
So it was that he hit upon the theme of his 
comedy, the ‘Difficult Age’; and this theme he 
developt so richly that the story seemed to have 
been devised solely to illustrate the thesis. In 
fact, if Lemaitre had not frankly confest that the 
exciting cause of his comedy was the desire to 
find a part to fit Coquelin, no spectator of the 
play would ever have suspected it. 

If there had been no Coquelin, there would 
have been no ‘Age Difficile’ and no ‘Chantecler,’ 
no ‘Aiglon’ and no ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’—just 
as it is possible that without Mlle. Champsmeslé 
there might have been no ‘Phédre’ and without 
Burbage there might have been no ‘Hamlet,’ no 
‘Othello’ and no ‘Lear.’ For the full expansion of 
the energy of the dramatic poet the stimulus of 
the actor is as necessary as the response of the 
audience. In his old age Goethe confided to 
Eckermann that he had been discouraged as a 
dramatist by the lack of these two necessities. 
“If I had produced an effect, and had met with 
applause, | would have written a round dozen of 
pieces such as ‘Iphigenia’ and ‘Tasso’: there was 

190 


THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER 


no deficiency of material. But actors were want- 
ing to represent such pieces with life and spirit; 
and a public was wanting to hear and receive them 
with sympathy.” 

The merely literary critic who judges a drama 
as if it were a lyric, as if it were simply the ex- 
pression of the poet’s mood at the moment of 


_ creation, often fails to understand the play be- 


cause he has no consciousness of the complexity 
of the dramatic art, which must needs languish 
unless there is the hearty cooperation of the three 
necessary elements,—the playwright to compose, 
the player to impersonate, and the playgoer to 
respond to the double appeal of player and play- 
wright. 

The dramatists have always been conscious of 
the intimacy with which their work is associated 
with the work of the actors. In the preface to 
one of his slightest pieces, ‘L’Amour Médecin,’ 
Moliére put his opinion on record: “Everybody 
knows that comedies are written only to be acted, 
and | recommend the reading of this play only 
to those who have eyes to discover while reading 
all the by-play of the stage.” And Mr. Henry 
_Arthur Jones asserts that “actors are on the stage 
to fill in a hundred supplementary touches to 
the author’s ten;—but this leads to the quaintest 
results, since the actor has the choice of filling in 
the wrong hundred in the wrong places. And the 
public and critics always suppose that he has 

IgI 


7 
4, 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


filled them in rightly. How can they do other- 
wise? They can judge only by what they see and 
hear.” . 


IV 


HERE is what may be called the paradox of 
dramatic criticism—that on the first night of an 
unpublisht play, the public and the critics have 
to take the performance as a whole, finding it a 
task of insuperable delicacy to disentangle the 
work of the players from the work of the play- 
wright. They can form their opinion of the value 
of the play itself only from that single perform- 
ance; and they can form their opinion of the 
value of the individual actor only from the im- 
pression he has made at that performance. Now, 
it is matter of common knowledge that sometimes 
good parts are ill-played and bad parts well- 
played. But on the first night, how are the public 
and the critics to know in advance which are the 
eood parts and which are the bad partsr There 
are parts which seem to be showy and effective, 
and which are not so in reality. In French there 
is a term for them ;—“ false good parts,” faux bons 
roles. For example, in Sardou’s ‘Patrie,’ perhaps 
his finest play, the heroine has to express an in- 
cessant series of emotions; she has abundant occa- 
sion for powerful acting; and yet half-a-dozen 
actresses of authority have been tempted to essay 
the part without success. The character is high- 

192 


THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER 


strung and wilful, but she is not true and sincere; 
she is artificial and arbitrary; and the audience 
is dumbly conscious of this trickiness and looks 
on at her exhibition of histrionics with languid 
sympathy. It is a false good part. 

On the other hand there are parts that “play 
themselves”’ and there are pieces that are “actor- 
proof’’—effective even if performed only by an 
ordinary company without any actors of accred- 
ited ability. Hamlet is a part that “plays itself,” 
since the plot of the piece is so moving that it 
supports the performer of the central figure even 
if he is not really equal to the character. George 
Henry Lewes asserted that no one of the leading 
English tragedians had ever completely failed as 
Hamlet,—whereas the greatest of them all, David 
Garrick, had made so complete a fiasco as Othello 
that he never dared to appear in the piece a second 
time. 

The ‘ Tartuffe’ of Moliére is an actor-proof play, 
holding the interest of the audience even when an 
uninspired company is giving a ragged perform- 
ance. Almost as actor-proof are ‘As You Like 
It’ and the ‘School for Scandal.’ All three of 
these comedies reward the most competent and 
the most careful performance; but they do not de- 
mand this. Their appeal is so broad and so certain 
that they can be carried off by good will, aided in 
the case of the two English comedies by high 
spirits. Then too their reputation is solidly 

193 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


establisht and widespread; and the spectator 
comes to them assured that he will have enter- 
tainment, predisposed to easy enjoyment. Quite 
possibly no one of the three comedies was actor- 
proof at its first performance; and perhaps they 
might then have been killed by an inadequate 
performance of any one of their more important 
characters. 

Moliére was his own stage-manager and at the 
first performance of ‘L’Amour Médecin’ he was 
responsible for “all the by-play of the stage.” 
And when Mr. Henry Arthur Jones produces his 
own plays he takes care that the actor shall not fill 
in the wrong “hundred supplementary touches.” 
But when the author of the play is dead or un- 
able to be present at the rehearsals, we sometimes 
see “the quaintest results.” There are actors 
who are supersubtle in the supplying of the little 
touches which the dramatist has left to their dis- 
cretion, and who so embroider the parts they are 
playing that the main outline is obscured and en- 
feebled. 

At the end of the nineteenth century there was 
an actor of prominence whose career I had fol- 
lowed with interest for more than a score of years, 
observing the expansion of his reputation and the 
deterioration of his art. When I first saw him on 
the stage he was direct and swift, creating a char- 
acter in bold outline; and at the end of a quarter 
of a century he had become painfully over-in- 

194 


THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE PLAYER 


genious in the accumulation of superfluities of 
detail which maskt the main lines of the part. 
In fact he had begun by acting inside the char- 
acter and he had ended by acting outside it. 
The result was quaint enough; but it was also 
pitiably ineffective; and if the authors of the 
plays he thus disfigured by the trivialities of his 
jig-saw fret-work could have beheld his perform- 
ance, they would have cried out in protest at this 
betrayal of their purpose. 


(1915.) 


195 


XI 
IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


I 


T is one of the many interesting and significant 
coincidences of history that the more com- 
pletely a smaller country may be absorbed into 
a larger nation, the more likely are the inhabitants 
of the lesser community to cherish their own pro- 
vincial peculiarities. They seek to keep alive 
the local traditions and to revive the local cus- 
toms: and often they strive to reinvigorate the 
local dialect and to raise it to a loftier level, that 
it may be fitter to express their local patriotism, 
different from their larger national patriotism 
but in no wise antagonistic to it. As a result of 
this pride in the past and of this pleasure in the 
present there is likely to arise a local literature 
in the local variation from the standard speech . 
of the nation—the standard speech assiduously 
taught in the schools, which are ever struggling 
to eradicate in the illiterate every vestige of the 
dialect that the men of letters are cultivating with 
careful art. And this deliberate provincialism 
is not factional or separatist; it indicates no re- 
laxing of loyalty toward the nation. Indeed, in 
196 


IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


so far as any political significance is concerned, 
the outflowering of a dialect literature may 
be taken as evidence of national solidarity and of 
the dying down of older sectional animosities. 

It was in the last quarter of the eighteenth cen- 
tury and in the first quarter of the nineteenth, 
when Scotland had at last accepted the Han- 
overian succession, that Burns and Scott and 
lesser lyrists of a varying endowment made use 
of the broad Scots tongue to sing the sorrows and 
the joys of the North Briton. It was in the third 
and fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, after 
the fierce ardor of the Revolutionary expansion 
and of the Napoleonic conquests had _ finally 
welded France into a self-conscious unity, that 
Mistral and his fellow-bards told again the old 
legends of Provence and illumined that fair land 
with new tales of no less charm, all composed in a 
modern revision of the soft and gentle speech of 
the troubadours. And nowit is just at the begin- 
ning of the twentieth century, after three score 
years of incessant agitation have removed most of 
the wrongs of the Irish people, that Yeats and 
Synge and Lady Gregory have bidden their fellow- 
countrymen to gaze at themselves in the mirror of 
the drama and to listen to their own persuasive 
brogue. 

Surprize has been exprest at the sudden bur- 
geoning forth of this new Irish drama almost at 
the behest of Lady Gregory. But when due 

197 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


consideration is given to the long list of Irishmen 
who have held their own in the English theater, 
there is cause for wonder rather that Ireland did 
not have a drama of its own long ago. In fact 
the history of English dramatic literature, and 
more especially the record of English comedy, 
would be sadly shrunken if the Hibernian con- 
tribution could be cancelled. We can estimate 
the gap that this operation would make when we 
recall the names of George Farquhar, Richard 
Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheri- 
dan, John O’Keefe, Sheridan Knowles, Samuel 
Lover, Dion Boucicault, John Brougham, Oscar 
Wilde, Bernard Shaw and “George A. Birming- 
ham.” There is food for thought as well as for 
laughter in the saying that “English comedy has 
either been written by Irishmen or else adapted 
from the French.” A harsh and cynical critic 
might even go further and add—having Steele 
in mind for one and for another Boucicault— 
that sometimes English comedy has been both 
written by an Irishman and adapted from the 
French. 

It is to English comedy that these Irishmen 
contributed; it is not to Irish comedy. The ad- 
mission may be made that one or another of 
them now and again sketcht a fellow-countryman 
or two; but before Lover and Boucicault no one 
of these Irish dramatists peopled a play with 
Irish characters and laid its scene in Ireland, 

190 


IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


Altho they must have known Ireland and the 
Irish better than they knew England and the 
English, it is to the portrayal of the latter that 
they gave their loving attention, neglecting alto- 
gether the delineation of the former. For some 
reason they were not tempted to employ thei 
talents at home and to devote themselves to the 
depicting of the manners and customs of their 
own island. Probably the explanation of their 
refusal to utilize the virgin material that lay 
ready to their hands is to be found in the fact 
that to achieve a living wage they had to write 
for the London theaters, the audiences of which 
took little or no interest either in Ireland or in 
the Irish. 

Whatever the reason may be why these bril- 
liant Irish playwrights did not write plays of 
Irish life, there is no denying that they did not, 
and that it was left for the contemporary support- 
ers of the Abbey Theater to plow the fresh fields 
which their predecessors had refused to cultivate. 
Even the later English comic dramatists of Irish 
birth have eschewed themes fundamentally Irish 
and have rarely introduced Irish characters into 
their English plays; there is not a single Irish 
part in all Oscar Wilde’s comedies and there is 
only one of Mr. Shaw’s pieces the scene of which 
is laid in Ireland. Irish novelists, Maria Edge- 
worth, Banin, Carleton, Lever and Lover, won 
fame by writing Irish stories; but only Lover and 

199 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Boucicault wrote Irish plays. The Irish drama- 
tists were all of them working for the London 
market and they were subdued to what they workt 
in. 


II 


WHEN we consider the closeness of Ireland to 
England, and the ease of communication we can 
only marvel at the infrequency with which Irish 
characters appear in English plays. There is no 
Irishman—except the slim profile of Captain 
Macmorris in ‘Henry V’—in all Shakspere’s 
comedies and histories and tragedies, altho there 
are Scotsmen and Welshmen. Apparently the 
earliest Irish character in the English drama did 
not step on the stage until after the Restoration 
and nearly fifty years after Shakspere’s death. 
This earliest Irish character was a comic servant, 
called Teague, who appears in Sir Robert How- 
ard’s ‘Committee,’ a play which Pepys went to 
see in June, 1663. And apparently the second 
Irish character was another Tegue in Shadwell’s 
‘Lancashire Witches and Tegue O’Divelly the 
Irish Priest,’ a highly colored piece which was 
produced in 1681. The first Teague was devised 
to provoke laughter, whereas the second Tegue 
was intended to be detested and despised as an 
intriguing villain. It seems probable that this 
portrayal of a Hibernian scoundrel by an English 
playwright was pleasing to the London play- 

200 


IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


goers, since Shadwell brought him forward again 
a few years later in another play, the ‘Amorous 
Bigot,’ produced in 1690. 

Then came the first of the native Irishmen who 
were to brighten English comedy with their in- 
genuity and their wit, and their grace and their 
good humor—the first, and perhaps the most 
gifted of them all, George Farquhar. After try- 
ing his wings in public as an actor, an experience 
which explains the superior briskness and _ the- 
atrical effectiveness of his plays over those of 
his immediate predecessors, Congreve, Wycherly 
and Vanbrugh, he went over to London and “‘com- 
menced playwright.” Yet he did not draw on his 
knowledge of his own people; and in all his plays 
we find only two relatively unimportant and ab- 
solutely insignificant Irish characters. One of 
these is another Teague in the more or less success- 
ful ‘Twin Rivals,’ produced in 1705; and the 
other is an Irish priest in the triumphantly suc- 
cessful ‘Beaux’ Stratagem,’ produced in 1707. 

We cannot even guess what Farquhar might 
have done if he had survived, and whether or 
not he would have drawn more richly upon his 
recollections of his fellow-countrymen after his 
repeated success had given him confidence in 
himself and authority over the public. His 
career was cut short by death before he was 
thirty—about the age when Sheridan abandoned 
playmaking for politics. It has been noted that 

201 


- THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


the novelist is likely to flower late and often not 
fully to reveal his capacity as a creator of char- 
acter until he is forty, whereas the dramatist 
may win his spurs when he is still in the first 
flush of youth. Playmaking demands inventive 
cleverness, first of all, and dexterity of craftsman- 
ship, and these are qualities which a young man 
may possess in abundance almost as native gifts, 
even tho he may not have had time to reflect 
deeply upon the spectacle of human folly, which 
is the prime staple of comedy. 

It is possibly because he was an Irishman that 
Farquhar’s morality is not ignoble like Congreve’s 
and Wycherly’s. He is not to be classed with the 
rest of the Restoration dramatists, as is usually 
done. Farquhar may offend our latterday pro- 
priety, now and again, by his plain-spoken speech, 
but he is never foul in his plotting, as are Wycherly 
and Congreve, whom he surpasses also in the 
adroitness of this plotting. His dialog can be 
clensed by excision, whereas their dirt lies deeper 
and cannot be overcome by all the perfumes of 
Araby. It is upon Farquhar that Sheridan 
modelled himself, and not upon Congreve as has 
often been assumed. The ‘School for Scandal’ 
may reveal an attempt to echo the wit of the 
‘Way of the World’; but its solid structure and 
its skilful articulation of incident disclose a close 
study of the ‘Inconstant,’ the ‘ Recruiting Officer’ 
and the ‘Beaux’ Stratagem,’ all of them fre- 

202 


IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


quently acted when Sheridan was serving his 
apprenticeship as a playwright. 


Ill 


IN crediting Farquhar with a finer moral 
sense than Congreve or Wycherly, it must in 
fairness be noted that they composed their more 
important comedies before Jeremy Collier had 
attackt the rampant indecency which char- 
acterized the English comic drama at the end of 
the seventeenth century, and that Farquhar came 
forward as a playwright after the non-conformist 
divine had cleared the air by his bugle-blast. 
The dramatist who took Collier’s remarks most 
to heart was Farquhar’s contemporary and fellow 
Irishman, Steele. But unlike Farquhar, Steele 
decided to be deliberately didactic. He declared 
that in his comedy, the ‘Funeral,’ produced in 
1701, altho it was “full of incidents that move 
laughter,” nevertheless “virtue and vice appear 
just as they ought to do.”’ Steele was even more 
ostentatiously moral in the ‘Lying Lover,’ pro- 
duced in 1704 and withdrawn ofter only a few 
performances, its author asserting sadly that 
the play had been “damned for its piety.” 
Yet in neither of these early comedies, nor later in 
the ‘Conscious Lovers,’ does Steele introduce any 
Irish character. 

And we do not discover any Irish character in 

203 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


either of the comedies of Oliver Goldsmith, the 
‘Good-natured Man,’ produced in 1768, and ‘She 
Stoops to Conquer,’ produced in 1773. A year 
after this second comedy had establisht itself 
as a favorite on the stage, where it is still seen with 
pleasure after seven score years, Goldsmith died, 
at the comparatively early age of forty-six. Here 
again, it is idle to speculate on what he might 
have achieved as a dramatist after the stage-doors 
had swung wide to welcome him. If he had sur- 
vived, it is possible that he might have been 
tempted to take a theme from his native island 
and to treat it with all his genial insight into hu- 
man nature, never likely to be keener or more 
caressing than in dealing with his own country- 
men. 

Two years after Goldsmith had brought out 
‘She Stoops to Conquer,’ Sheridan brought out 
the ‘Rivals,’ to be followed in swift succession 
and with equal success by the “Duenna,’ the 
‘School for Scandal’ and the ‘Critic.’ Then he 
forsook the theater for the more temporary stage 
offered to him by politics. In only one of these 
varied masterpieces of comedy is there an Irish 
character. This single specimen is Sir Lucius 
O’Trigger in the ‘Rivals,’ easily the best Irish 
part that had yet appeared in any comedy, and 
surpast by scarcely any Irish character in any 
later play, English or Irish. Sir Lucius is an 
Irish gentleman; he is essentially a gentleman 

204 


IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


and he is intensely Irish. Here was a novelty, 
since most of the few Irish characters already 
introduced into English comedy had been serv- 
ants, first of all, and secondly only superficially 
Irish. Oddly enough, the bad acting of the origi- 
nal impersonator of Sir Lucius, a performer named 
Lee, almost caused the failure of the ‘Rivals’ at 
the first and second performances. The comedy 
was then withdrawn for repairs, and for the re- 
hearsal of another actor, Clinch, as Sir Lucius. 
In gratitude to Clinch for the rescue of the ‘Ri- 
vals’ from the doom that impended, Sheridan im- 
provised for his benefit a two-act farce, called 
‘St. Patrick’s Day, or the Scheming Lieutenant,’ 
a lively little play of no importance, in which 
Clinch appeared as the scheming lieutenant, an 
Irishman, only superficially Hibernian. 

It is strange that the popularity of Sir Lucius 
and his appeal to the public did not lure the later 
English comic dramatists of Irish nativity to 
invite other characters over from the island of 
their own birth. But we do not recall any Irish 
part in any of the many plays of John O’ Keefe, 
only one of whose comedies ‘Wild Oats’ is ever 
seen on the stage of today, and then only at in- 
tervals which are constantly lengthening. Nor 
can we recall any Irish part in any of the top- 
lofty comedies of Sheridan Knowles, composed 
partly in turgid prose and partly in very blank 
verse, devoid all of them of the wit and the 

205 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


gaiety and the liveliness which we believe we 
have a right to expect from an Irish dramatist. 

Very Irish however are the pieces made out of 
the ‘Handy Andy’ and the ‘Rory O’Moore’ of 
Samuel Lover; and most characteristically Hi- 
bernian is the lighthearted hero of Lover’s farcical 
little fantasy called the ‘Happy Man.’ That 
these slight plays of Lover’s represent almost the 
only attempts to deal with Irish character on the 
English stage in the earlier half of the nineteenth 
century is the more surprizing since Miss Edge- 
worth had long since disclosed the richness of the 
material proffering itself to any keen observer 
intimate with Irish conditions. Walter Scott, at 
least, had seen the value of ‘Castle Rackrent’ and 
of the ‘Absentee’; and he is on record as confessing 
that one of the motives which urged him to the 
composition of ‘Waverly,’ and of its immediate 
successors, was the desire to do for the Scottish 
peasant what Miss Edgeworth had done for the 
Irish peasant. It is to be regretted that the most 
popular of the Irish followers of Scott in the writ- 
ing of tales of adventure was Charles Lever, whose 
earlier and more rollicking romances are happy- 
go-lucky in their plotting, and never disclose 
any desire for significant character-delineation. 
Lever’s scampering stories were so loose-jointed 
that they were almost impossible to dramatize, 
and even when they were turned into plays they 
did not demand critical consideration. 

206 


IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


IV 


THEN toward the end of the first half of the 
nineteenth century appeared the most prolific 
of all native Irish playwrights, Dion Boucicault. 
But it was long after he had become a very 
expert purveyor of theatrical wares for the 
theaters of London and New York that Boucicault 
turned to his native island for a theme. His 
first play was ‘LondonAssurance, a five-act comedy 
with its scene laid in England and with a single 
Irish character. There is a green-room tradition 
that the play had been put together by another 
young and aspiring Irishman, John Brougham, 
that its original title was ‘Irish Assurance,’ and 
that the part now called Dazzle had originally 
borne an Irish name, having been intended by the 
ambitious Brougham for his own acting. Nearly 
forty years ago, when | ventured to ask Brougham 
as to this tradition and as to his share in the 
composition of the play, he laughed a little sadly, 
and then gave me this enigmatic answer, “ Well, 
I’ve been paid not to claim it!” 

Whatever may have been Brougham’s share in 
the beginning, there can be no dispute as to 
Boucicault’s share at the end. ‘London Assur- 
ance’ is not like ‘Playing with Fire’ or any other 
of Brougham’s later plays; and it is exactly like 
‘Old Heads and Young Hearts’ and half-a-dozen of 
Boucicault’s succeeding comedies, the work all of 

207 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


them of an old heart and a young head,—hard, 
glittering, insincere and theatrically effective. 
In these pieces Boucicault was compounding five- 
act comedies in accord with the traditional form- 
ula of the English stage, inherited from Sheridan 
and Congreve, and becoming at every remove 
more remote from reality and more resolutely 
artificial. Altho one of this early group of 
Boucicault’s comedies was called the ‘Irish Heir- 
ess,’ they were all English plays, with only a rare 
Irish character. A few years later, after Bouci- 
cault had become an actor himself, he wrote for 
his own acting a series of pleasantly sentimental 
Irish melodramas stuft with sensational scenery,— 
‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ with its sinking wall, the 
‘Shaughraun’ with its turning tower, and the 
‘Colleen Bawn’ with the spectacular dive of its 
hero into the pool where its heroine is drowning. 
The theatrical effectiveness of these pieces was un- 
deniable and it was rewarded by long continued 
popular approval; but no one of them had any 
validity as a study of life and character in Ire- 
land. They were very clever indeed, but they 
were only clever; and they but skimmed the 
surface of life, never cutting beneath it to lay 
bare unexpected aspects of human nature. It 
is characteristic that two of the later pieces in 
which Boucicault appeared as an Irishman were 
adaptations from the French, ‘Daddy O’Dowd’ 
(from ‘Les Crochets du Pére Martin’) and 
208 


IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


‘Kerry’ (from ‘La Joie fait Peur’). That he 
could so twist these French plots with their for- 
elgn motives as to make them masquerade as 
Irish plays is testimony to his incessant clever- 
ness; but it is evidence also that the Irish veneer 
was so thin as to be almost transparent. 

Yet however artificial and superficial might be 
these Irish pieces of Boucicault’s, at least they 
were more or less Irish, in that they pretended 
to deal with Irish life in Ireland itself. This is 
what no one of the earlier Irishmen writing plays 
for the London stage had ventured to attempt; 
and it was what the wittiest Irish dramatist of 
the generation following Boucicault’s never did. 
Oscar Wilde was an Irishman who never toucht 
an Irish theme or sketcht an Irish character. 
He never put into his plays any of the haunting 
sadness, the humorous melancholy of Ireland. 
He was not quite as free-handed as Boucicault in 
levying on the private property of his contem- 
poraries, yet he was willing enough to take his 
own wherever he found it. His dramatic methods 
are derivative, to put it mildly. Altho he com- 
posed a “Duchess of Padua’ more or less in imita- 
tion of Victor Hugo and a ‘Salome’ more or less 
in imitation of Flaubert, the most popular of his 
plays are comedies of modern London life, more 
or less in imitation of Sardou. ‘Lady Winde- 
mere’s Fan’ is in accord with the latest Parisian 
fashion of the season in which it was originally 

209 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


produced; and even the young girl’s trick of utter- 
ing only the same two words,—“ Yes, mamma”’— 
in answer to all questions is an echo of Gondinet’s 
‘Oh, Monsieur.’ The more farcical comedy called 
the ‘Importance of being Earnest’ is a striking 
example of Wilde’s imitative method, the first 
act and half of the second act having a closely 
knit comic embroglio such as we find in Labiche’s 
‘Plus Heureux des Trois’ and ‘Célimare le Bien- 
Aimé’ and the rest of the piece being loosely 
put together in the whimsical manner of W. S. 
Gilbert’s ‘Engaged.’ 

There is nothing in any of Oscar Wilde’s plays 
to reveal his Irish birth—unless we may credit 
to his nativity his abundant cleverness and his 
ready wit, the coruscating fireworks of which 
were sometimes exploded by an_ ill-concealed 
slow-match. It is almost as tho the apostle of 
estheticism recoiled from his native island and 
deliberately refused to be interested in his 
fellow-countrymen. And almost the same re- 
mark might be made about a later and far more 
richly gifted English author of Irish birth, 
Bernard Shaw. Of all his score or more plays 
only one, ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ is Irish in 
its subject; and this sole exception, so the author 
himself tells us, was due to the urgent request 
of Yeats, who begged him to come to the aid 
of the struggling Abbey Theater in Dublin. As 
it happens, ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ was never 

210 


IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


produced at the playhouse for which it was com- 
posed, because, as Shaw confesses, “it was un- 
congenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic 
movement, which is bent on creating a new 
Ireland after its own ideal.” 


Vv 


In the United States, with our scattered Irish 
contingent, Boucicault’s Irish pieces were as 
successful as they were in Great Britain. John 
Brougham, following in Boucicault’s footsteps, 
wrote plays to order for Barney Williams and 
William J. Florence, cutting his cloth close to the 
figure of the special performer he was fitting. In 
the American variety-shows a host of Irish im- 
personators of both sexes presented broad carica- 
tures of Irish character often rooted in reality. 
And here in New York there was developt out 
of these variety-show caricatures a special type 
of robust Irish comedy, more veracious than Bou- 
cicault’s sentimental melodramas. Edward Har- 
rigan began with a mere sketch, the ‘ Mulligan 
Guards,’ peopled with half-a-dozen species of 
Irishmen acclimated in America; and as he was 
encouraged by immediate appreciation on the 
part of our cosmopolitan and hospitable public, 
he went on, feeling his way and refining his 
method, until he attained the summit of his reach 
in the delightful ‘Squatter Sovereignty,’ with its 

Zi! 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


beautifully differentiated groups of the clan 
Murphy and the clan Macintyre. It need not 
be denied that there were wilful extravagances in 
this series of studies of the New York Irishman 
and that to the very end there were traces of 
the variety-show out of which this type of play 
had been evolved; but no native Irishman had 
a more realistic humor than Harrigan nor a keener 
insight into human nature. 

Then we come to the beginning of the twentieth 
century and to the founding of the Abbey Theater 
in Dublin, to the movement led by Lady Gregory 
and adorned by the widely different talents of 
Yeats and Synge. Here was at last a new de- 
parture of the Irish drama in Ireland itself. 
Here were plays of very varying value and of 
many different kinds, alike only in this, that they 
eschewed manufactured bulls; that they did not 
rely on a varnish of paraded brogue; that they 
did not deal in boisterous fun-making for its own 
sake,—their fun depending rather upon a subtler 
humor tinged with melancholy; and that they 
were no longer contented with an external in- 
dication of superficial Irish characteristics, but 
sought an internal and intimate expression of the 
essential. These new-Irish plays were not Irish 
by accident; they were Irish by intention, Irish 
in character and in action, Irish in motive and 
in sentiment, Irish thru and thru, immitigably 
Irish. 


212 


IRISH PLAYS AND IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 


The late Laurence Hutton once defined an 
American play as a play written by an American 
on an American theme and carried on solely by 
American characters; but he had to confess the 
falsity of this definition when it was pointed out 
to him that so rigid a demand would exclude from 
the French drama the ‘Cid’ of Corneille, the ‘Don 
Juan’ of Moliére, the ‘Phédre’ of Racine, and the 
“Ruy Blas’ of Hugo, while it would also rule out 
of the English drama the ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 
the ‘Hamlet’ and the ‘Julius Cesar’ of Shak- 
spere. Yet there is significance in the sugges- 
tion, nevertheless; and these new Irish plays of 
Lady Gregory, of Yeats and of Synge, are all the 
more Irish because they were written by Irishmen 
on Irish themes and peopled exclusively by Irish 
characters. 


(1914.) 


XII 


THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC; 
DRAMA 


I 


jp an illuminating criticism of the operas of 
Puccini, by D. C. Parker, there is a passage 
which may serve as a text for the present paper. 
The British writer pointed out that in ‘Madame 
Butterfly’ the Italian musician struck out a new 
line in his choice of a theme, widely different from 
those which had hitherto appealed to composers, 
in that he deserted the old world of romanticism 
and of picturesque villainy, preferring, for the 
moment at least, a world which is neither old nor 
romantic and in which the villainy is not pictur- 
esque. 

“We breathe the air of these times and a 
modern battleship rides at anchor in the bay. 
Opera is a convention and a realization of the 
fact should throw some light on the suitability of 
subjects. It was not without reason that Wagner 
insisted upon the value of legendary plots, and | 
am sure that it is a reliable instinct which whispers 
to us that there is something wrong when Pinker- 
ton offers Sharpless a whiskey and soda. The 

214 


THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA 


golden goblet of the Middle Age, the love-philter 
of Wagner, we can cheerfully accept. But a 
decanter and a syphon break the spell and cause 
a heaviness of heart to true children of the opera- 
world.” 

This is sound doctrine, beyond all question; 
and yet Mr. Parker based it only upon a reliable 
instinct, without caring to go deeper and to ask 
why we are willing to quaff a love-philter from the 
golden goblet and why we hesitate to sip a 
draught mixt before our eyes from syphon and 
decanter. Yet he hinted at the reason for our 
acceptance of the one and for our rejection of the 
other when he reminded us that “opera is a 
convention.” But it needs more than a realiza- 
tion of this fact to enable us to develop a reliable 
instinct in regard to the subjects most suitable for 
operatic treatment. It needs an inquiry into 
the exact meaning of the word convention, as Mr. 
Parker here employed it. Perhaps we may at- 
tain to a solider ground than that supplied by a 
reliable instinct if we ask ourselves what is the 
necessity of convention in any of the arts, more 
particularly in the art of the drama and most 
particularly in the art of opera. 

No doubt, these questions have often been askt 
and as often answered, altho the responses have 
not always been wholly satisfactory. This is no 
bar to a reargument of the case, even if there is 
no new evidence to be introduced. The French 

215 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


critic was wise as well as witty when he declared 
that “everything has already been said that could 
be said: but as nobody listened to it, we shall 
have to say it all over again.” Moreover, very 
few of us are conscious of the immense number 
of conventions by means of which we save time 
and spare ourselves friction in our daily life; 
and still fewer have taken the trouble to under- 
stand either the necessity for these conventions 
or the basis on which they stand. 

A convention is an agreement. In the arts 
it is an implied contract, a bargain tacit and taken 
for granted, because it is to the advantage of 
both parties. In the art of life the spoken word 
is a convention, and so is the written word. As 
John C. Van Dyke has aptly put it, in the open- 
ing chapter of his suggestive discussion on the 
‘Meaning of Pictures,’ when we wish to convey 
the idea of water to a friend we do not show him a 
glass of the fluid, we pronounce the word, which is 
by agreement the symbol of the thing. If we 
write it we use five letters, w-a-t-e-r, which bear 
no likeness whatever to the thing itself, and yet 
which bring it to mind at once. “This is the 
linguistic sign for water. The chemical sign for 
it H,O, is quite as arbitrary, but to the chemist 
it means water. And only a little less arbitrary 
are the artistic signs for it. The old Egyptian 
conveyed his meaning by waving a zigzag up oF 
down the wall; Turner in England often made a 

216 


THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA 


few horizontal scratches do duty for it; and in 
modern painting we have some blue paint touched 
with high lights to represent the same thing. 
None of these signs attempts to produce the orig- 
inal or has any other meaning than to suggest 
the original. They are signs which have meanings 
for us only because we agree to understand their 
meanings beforehand.” 

If we do not agree to accept the blue paint 
toucht with high lights or the few horizontal 
scratches as a proper method of representing 
water then we deny ourselves the pleasure of 
marine-painting and of pencil-drawing. The 
art of the painter is possible only if we are willing 
to allow him to contradict the facts of nature so 
that he may delight us with the truth of nature 
as heseesit. In the preface to his most abidingly 
popular play, the ‘Dame aux Camiélias,’ the 
younger Dumas declared that there is “in all the 
arts a share, larger or smaller but indispensable, 
which must be left to convention. Sculpture 
lacks color, painting lacks relief; and they are 
rarely the one or the other, in the dimensions of 
the nature they represent. The more richly 
you bestow on a statue the color of life, the more 
surely you inflict upon it the appearance of death, 
because in the rigid attitude to which it is con- 
demned by the material it is made of, it must al- 
ways lack movement, which even more than color 
and form is the proof of life.” 

217 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Still more striking is the passage in which 
the late John La Farge asserted the immitigable 
necessity of convention in these same twin-arts 
of painting and sculpture:-—“ When I work as 
an artist I begin at once by discarding the way 
in which things are really done, and translating 
them at once into another material. Therein con- 
sists the pleasure that you and I take in the work 
of art,—perhaps a new creation between us. The 
pleasure that such and such a reality gives me 
and you has been transposed. The great depth 
and perspective of the world, its motion, its never 
resting, | have arrested and stopt upon a little 
piece of flat paper. That very fact implies 
that I consider the flatness of my paper a fair 
method of translating the non-existence of any 
flatness in the world that I look at. If I ama 
sculptor I make for you this soft, waving, fluctu- 
ating, colored flesh in an mmovable, hard, rigid, 
fixt, colorless material, and it is this transposition 
which delights you; (as well as te in a lesser 
degree who have made it). Therefore at the 
very outset of my beginning to affect you by 
what is called the record of a truth, I am obliged 
to ask you to accept a number of the greatest 
impossibilities, evident to the senses, and some- 
times disturbing, when the convention supposed 
to be agreed upon between you and myself is 
understood only by one of the two parties.” 


218 


THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA 


II 


THESE quotations from La Farge and from 
Dumas call attention to the essential conditions of 
the arts of painting and of sculpture,—that the 
artists do not merely depart from reality, they 
contradict it absolutely. Only by so contradict- 
ing it can they provide us with the specific plea- 
sure that we expect from their respective arts. 
The portrait painter has to present the head of 
his sitter motionless on a flat surface and the 
portrait sculptor has to present the head of his 
sitter motionless and without color, or rather with 
the uniform tint of his material, clay or plaster, 
marble or bronze. And the public accepts these 
greatest impossibilities not only without protest 
but without any overt consciousness that they 
are impossibilities. The public, as a whole, is not 
aware that it is a party to an implied contract; 
it is so accustomed to the essential conventions of 
these two arts that it receives the result of their 
application as perfectly natural. 

In fact, the public can scarcely be said to have 
made the tacit bargain; rather has it inherited 
the implied contract from its remotest ancestors, 
the cave-men who scratched profile outlines on the 
bones of animals now for centuries extinct. 
The public is so accustomed to the methods of the 
painters and of the sculptors that when its atten- 
tion is called to the fact that it is accepting the 

219 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


greatest impossibilities it is frankly surprized 
at the unexpected revelation and not altogether 
pleased. As a whole, the public is not curious 
to analize the sources of its pleasures; it is per- 
fectly content to enjoy these pleasures without 
question, as its fathers and its forefathers had 
enjoyed them century after century. To 
say this is to say that the fundamental conven- 
tions of painting and of sculpture have not been 
consciously agreed to by the existing public; 
they have just been taken for granted. 

So in like manner have the fundamental con- 
ventions of the drama and of the music-drama 
been taken for granted, generation after genera- 
tion, altho they involve departures from the fact, 
contradictions of the fact, impossibilities (to 
borrow La Farge’s exact word) quite as great as 
those which underly and make possible painting 
and sculpture. Just as the conventions of the 
graphic arts were establisht by the cave-dwellers 
who made the first primitive sketches of the 
mastodon, so the conventions of the dramatic 
arts were willingly accepted by the spectators of 
the earliest dance-pantomime, more or less spon- 
taneously evolved to celebrate the coming of the 
springtime or the gathering of the harvest. 

All the permanent conventions of the drama 
are accepted by the public because they are for its 
benefit, to heighten its pleasure, to prevent it 
from being bored, or even from having its atten- 

220 


THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA 


tion distracted by minor things not pertinent to 
the matter in hand. In real life all stories are 
straggling; they are involved with extraneous 
circumstance; and they continue indefinitely into 
the future as they began indefinitely in the past. 
The playwright arbitrarily chooses a point of 
departure; he resolutely eliminates all accom- 
panying circumstances and all environing char- 
acters not contributory to the arbitrary end upon 
which he has decided. He peoples his plot with 
only the characters absolutely needed; and he 
conducts his action swiftly from start to finish, 
heaping, situation upon situation, so as to arouse 
and retain and stimulate the interest of the spec- 
tators as the artificially compacted story moves 
irresistibly and inevitably to its climax. 

His characters always make use of his native 
tongue, which is also the native tongue of the 
audience. In ‘Hamlet’ the Danes all speak Eng- 
lish; in “Romeo and Juliet’ the Italians all speak 
English; and in ‘Julius Casar’ the Romans all 
speak English. Moreover they all make use of 
an English that no mortal man ever used in real 
life, not even Shakspere himself. Every one of 
them always expresses himself accurately and 
adequately, and completely, with no hesitancies, 
no repetitions, no fumbling for words; and every 
one of them apprehends instantly and under- 
stands precisely everything that everyone else 
may say tohim. All the language used, whether 

221 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


in prose or in verse, is highly condensed, inexor- 
ably compact, transparently clear. There is 
no need to point out that this is a state of lin- 
guistic efficiency unknown in everyday life, filled 
with the halting babble of a myriad of insignifican- 
cies. Yet this departure from reality, this con- 
tradiction of the fact, this impossibility, is as- 
sented to not only gladly but unthinkingly. The 
bargain is not consciously made, it is taken for 
granted, partly because it is for the benefit of 
the spectators and partly because it is an ances- 
tral inheritance. 

These are all essential conventions of the 
drama, without which it could not exist. They 
can be found in the plays of every people, ancient 
or modern, civilized or savage, in the lofty trage- 
dies of Athens, two thousand years ago, as well as 
in the farces of Paris five hundred years ago. 
They make possible the drama in prose, the 
drama in verse, the drama in song, and the 
drama in gesture. They are the fundamental 
conventions of the dramatic art, handed down by 
tradition and certain to survive so long as man 
shall find delight in the theater, in beholding a 
Story set on the stage to be shown in action be- 
fore his admiring eyes. From the beginning 
of things the playwright, like the painter and the 
sculptor, has always had to ask his audience “to 
accept a number of the greatest impossibilities.”’ 


222 


THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA 


Ill 


WHILE these are all of them permanent and 
essential conventions of the drama, there are 
others peculiar to the music-drama and to it 
equally necessary, since without them it could 
not exist,—indeed it could not even have come 
into being. 

We all know that the ordinary speech of man is 
prose, often careless and inaccurate, ragged and 
repetitious; and yet if we are to enjoy ‘Hamlet’ 
or ‘Macbeth’ we must accept the impossible sup- 
position that Denmark and Scotland were once 
inhabited by a race of beings whose customary 
speech was English blank verse. We all know 
that the ordinary speech of man is unrhythmic 
and unrimed; and yet if we are to find pleasure in 
“Tartuffe’ we must allow that Paris in the reign of 
Louis XIV was peopled by men and women whose 
customary speech was the rimed Alexandrine. 
So the convention which alone makes possible the 
beautiful art of pantomime—a form of drama re- 
stricted in its range but always delightful within 
its rigid limitations—is that there exists a race 
of beings who have never known articulate speech, 
who utter no sounds, and who communicate their 
feelings and their thoughts by the sole aid of 
gesture. If we are unwilling to assent to this 
monstrous proposition we deny ourselves in- 
stantly and absolutely all the pleasure that the 
art of pantomime can bestow. 

223 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Now, the convention which supports and makes 
possible the music-drama is that there is a race 
of beings whose natural speech is song and only 
song, with no recourse to merely spoken words. 
It is by the aid of song alone that the persons 
who people grand opera can communicate with 
one another, can transmit information, can ex- 
press their emotions. Of course, this is a prop- 
osition quite as monstrous as that upon which the 
art of pantomime is based,—or as those upon which 
the arts of painting and sculpture are founded. 
It is a proposition which any plain man of every- 
day common sense is at liberty to reject unhesitat- 
ingly; and no one has any right to blame him. 
All we have a right to do is to point out that the 
acceptance of this convention is a condition prece- 
dent to the enjoyment of opera and that he who 
absolutely refuses to be a party to the contract 
thereby deprives himself of all the delights which 
the music-drama may afford. 

Tolstoy was one of those who felt keenly the 
inherent absurdity of opera, if the test of reality 
is applied to it,—altho oddly enough he seems 
never to have become conscious that painting and 
sculpture are just as remote from the facts of 
nature. In his curiously individual treatise on 
‘What is Art?’ he narrates his visit to an opera- 
house while a performance of Wagner’s ‘Sieg- 
fried’ was taking place. This music-drama did 
not interest him, and he held it up to ridicule by 

224 


THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA 


the aid of the inexpensive device of satirically 
narrating the story as it was shown in action, and 
of describing realistically the appearance and 
gestures and utterances of the _ performers. 
“When I arrived,” Tolstoy writes, “an actor sat 
on the stage amid scenery intended to represent 
a cave, and before something which was meant 
to represent a smith’s forge. He was drest 
in tights, with a cloak of skins, wore a wig, and an 
artificial beard, and with white, weak, genteel 
hands beat an impossible sword with an unnatural 
hammer in a way in which no one uses a hammer; 
and at the same time, opening his mouth in a 
strange way, he sang something incomprehensi- 
ble.” 

This quotation is sufficient to show Tolstoy’s 
unsympathetic attitude and his unwillingness to 
accept the implied contract which opera calls for. 
Apparently Tolstoy was present at a performance 
not as perfect artistically as it ought to have been; 
but it is equally apparent that he would have 
been just as hostile if the performance had at- 
tained to an ideal perfection. What he was con- 
demning was the music-drama as an art-form; 
and the animus of his adverse verdict is his un- 
exprest expectation that opera ought to with- 
stand the test of reality. But opera is always un- 
natural and impossible. It is absurd and mon- 
strous that the dying Tristan’s last breath should 
be powerful enough to reach to the top gallery 

225 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


of a large opera house and that the Rhine-maidens 
should sing as they are swimming under water; 
but it is just as unnatural, impossible, absurd and 
monstrous that Hamlet should speak English 
blank verse and that the Mona Lisa should be 
motionless 

Here we recall again the final sentence of the 
pregnant passage earlier quoted from La Farge,— 
“T am obliged to ask you to accept a number of 
the greatest impossibilities evident to the senses 
and sometimes disturbing when the convention 
supposed to be agreed upon between you and 
myself is understood only by one of the two par- 
ties.” 


IV 


A.tHo the music-drama cannot provide plea- 
sure for those who do not understand the conven- 
tion or who wilfully refuse to accept it, “the true 
children of the opera-world,” as Mr. Parker feli- 
citously termed them, are so accustomed to this 
convention that they are rarely conscious of it. 
Nevertheless they do not wish to be unduly re- 
minded of it and to have their attention called 
to its various and manifold consequences. Wag- 
ner was wise in his generation in preferring to 
build his plots upon the legends of once-upon- 
a-time, because it is always easier to make- 
believe when we allow ourselves to be trans- 
ported on a magic carpet to that remote, vague 


226 


THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA 


and fantastic period. As we know that the 
Rhine-maidens never existed anywhere or any- 
when, we never think of cavilling at their ability 
to sing while they are swimming under water. 

But when a battleship swings at anchor and 
when Pinkerton produces a decanter and syphon 
to mix a whiskey and soda, we can hardly help 
being conscious of the artistic impossibility of 
Pinkerton’s extending his invitation in song, 
which we know not to be the mode of expression 
natural to an American of our own time asking a 
friend to take a drink. The sound rule for any 
artist would seem to be that, whatever his special 
art, he should carefully avoid everything which 
tends to awaken in the spectators the conscious- 
ness that they are parties toa bargain. The con- 
tract holds best when it is implicit, when neither 
party gives it a thought and when both parties 
abide by it. “The dramatist,’ so Lessing de- 
clared, ‘must avoid everything that can remind 
the audience of their illusion, for as soon as they 
are reminded, the illusion is gone.” 

This is the rule that William Gillette broke in 
his ‘Sherlock Holmes’, when he allowed one of his 
characters to describe the invisible fourth wall 
of the gas-chamber to which the cool and keen- 
witted detective was to be lured,—that fourth 
wall which had to be supposed away, so that the 
audience could hear and see what is taking place 
upon the stage. This same rule was again vio- 

227 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


lated by Jerome K. Jerome in the ‘Passing of the 
Third Floor Back’ and by Barrie in the ‘New 
Word,’ when these playwrights set a fender and 
fire-irons down by the prompter’s box, thus ask- 
ing the spectators to believe that there was an 
invisible fireplace in the invisible wall. 

Nearly a score of years ago I was present at a 
performance of ‘La Traviata’ in the opera-house 
at Vienna; and I was forced to observe the dis- 
advantage of an ill-advised attempt at realistic ex- 
actitude in the realm of operatic convention. | 
had been accustomed to see Verdi’s opera set in 
scenery of no particular place and of no particu- 
lar period,—and therefore not calling attention 
to itself; and I was also used to beholding the 
consumptive heroine arrayed in the very latest 
Paris gown, while her lovers wore a nondescript 
costume as dateless and as characterless as the 
scenery itself. The manager of the Vienna opera- 
house had unfortunately remembered that Verdi’s 
score was composed to a book made out of the 
‘Dame aux Camélias’ of the younger Dumas, 
originally performed in Paris in 1852; and there- 
fore he had sought an accurate reproduction of a 
series of Parisian rooms, with the draperies and 
the furniture of 1852, while the characters, male 
and female, lovely heroine and disconsolate lovers, 
were attired according to the French fashion- 
plates of that date. In the ballroom scene there- 
fore | beheld all the male members of the chorus 

228 


THE CONVENTIONS OF THE MUSIC-DRAMA 


habited in the evening dress of 1852 and carrying 
under their arms the closed crush-hat which had 
been invented by the ingenious M. Gibus only a 
little earlier. 

And | then had it brought home to me as never 
before how monstrously impossible the convention 
of opera is—and must be. I need not say that, 
as I sat there in the mood of unconscious enjoy- 
ment, I regretted having my attention wantonly 
called to the essential and permanent and inevita- 
ble convention by which alone the music-drama is 
made possible. It struck me not only as unwise 
but even as a little unfair. 


(1917.) 


229 


XIII 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE- 
SCENERY 


I 


"THIS is a time of unrest in the theater. In 

almost every modern literature the drama is 
aliveas it was not, half-a-century ago, in any litera- 
ture except the French. The public is slowly but 
steadily recovering the lost art of reading plays; 
and the American public, in particular, is ex- 
hibiting a constantly increasing interest in the 
dramatic literature of other languages, not only 
French and German, but also Scandinavian and 
Russian. We are becoming more and more cos- 
mopolitan; and we welcome with equal cordiality 
the ballet of the Russians and the pantomime of 
the French. A host of youthful enthusiasts have 
opened little theaters not only in the leading 
cities but even in some of the less important 
towns; and they have made many novel experi- 
ments both in the kind of play they have chosen 
to perform and in the method of presentation. 
These youthful enthusiasts are abundantly vocal 
in clamoring for a new departure in dramatic art, 
boldly demanding the abolition of the hamper- 

230 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


ing traditions of the nineteenth century. Some of 
them are ready to renounce the heritage of the 
past, and to venture into the future as upon an 
uncharted sea. Not a few of them seem to 
be possest by what the late E. L. Godkin once 
termed the “common illusion of young men that 
facility in composition indicates the existence of 
thought.” 

Gordon Craig, for example, who is hailed as one 
of the chief inspirers of the new movement in 
stage-decoration, is a very radical iconoclast, 
never concealing his profound dissatisfaction with 
the achievements of the stage-directors of today. 
Seemingly he wants the theater to declare its in- 
dependence of all the other arts, even including 
literature. At least this appears to be his desire, 
altho it is not a little difficult to find out from his 
manifestoes exactly what it is that he wishes. 
His thoughts, if not hazily held, are obscurely 
exprest. Seemingly, however, he looks forward 
to an isolation of the art of the theater as a result 
of its freeing itself from all entangling alliances 
and of relying solely on its own resources. 

If this really is his aim, its accomplishment 
would deprive the drama of the aid of literature 
and reduce it to pantomime,—which was, in- 
deed, its earliest and most primitive form. Now, 
it ought to be obvious that to force the drama 
to forego the aid of literature and of all the other 
arts, is to make it renounce its signal superiority 

231 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


over all these other arts. Music may invite the 
companionship of lyric poetry and the dance, 
just as architecture can enrich itself by invoking 
the assistance of sculpture and of painting. The 
drama stands alone in its ability to call in the 
collaboration not of one or two of the sister 
arts, but of all of them,—music and the song and 
the dance, painting, sculpture and architecture, 
even on occasion oratory and the epic. Wagner 
boldly proclaimed that his music-drama was to be 
the art-work of the future, simply because it 
was to be the result of the cordial cooperation of 
all the nine muses. It is because the drama has 
never been willing to restrict itself solely to the 
dramatic that it has achieved its surpassing 
breadth of appeal. 

But if Gordon Craig is not a cogent or a co- 
herent thinker, he is indisputably an artist of 
undeniable originality, individuality and fertility, 
as I can testify after a delightful London afternoon 
spent at an exhibition of his beautiful models. He 
is dissatisfied with the accepted methods of 
mounting plays and more especially with the 
elaborate complexity of the realistic scenery to 
which the stage-directors of the last two or 
three generations have accustomed us. He 
would annihilate both the complexity and the 
realism, substituting a symbolic simplicity, less 
expensive and more effective. His designs, if 
not always practical, have been suggestive; indeed 

232 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


sotrne of those whom he has inspired have been 
able to achieve results more satisfactory than 
any he has himself attained. In fact, he is frank 
in admitting that what he proposes may not be 
immediately practical, since his designs are only 
occasionally adjusted to the actual theater of 
today, some of them being intended for a type 
of theater which he foresees, and yet others for a 
theater which he glimpses in his mind’s eye and 
which is never likely to be erected. ‘That is to 
say, these impractical sets were invented for the 
sheer delight of the artist himself in their beauty 
and not for the benefit of future spectators 
gathered in front of the stage itself. 


II 


Tus brings us face to face with two questions. 
First, why are the ardent young enthusiasts so 
bitterly dissatisfied with the complex and realistic 
stage-sets to which we are accustomed? And, 
second, how did the realistic complication of our 
modern scenery come to be accepted all the 
world over? The latter had better be answered 
before the former. 

The orchestra of the Greek theater was devoid 
of scenery and so was the wide and shallow stage 
of the Roman theater. On the projecting plat- 
form of the Tudor theater there were all the 
properties that might be needful, thrones and 

233 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


beds, well-heads and arbors; but there was no 
painted scenery. In the theater of Louis XIV 
there might be scenery of a kind, summary and 
decorative, rather than characteristic; and the 
acting took place far in front of the scenery, such 
as it was, the performer standing well for 
ward between the lines of spectators seated on 
both sides of the stage and keeping close under the 
pendent chandeliers that he might be seen. Even 
on the English stage in the time of Sheridan, the 
acting was done on the apron curving forward 
into the audience and lighted by a semi-circle 
of inadequate oil-lamps. The characters of 
Sheridan, of Moliére and of Shakspere stood 
nearly all the time; and chairs were provided for 
them only on the very rare occasions when the 
plot of the play required them to be seated. 

In the eighteenth century the novel had not 
come into its own; it was held to be so inferior 
to the drama that it escaped from the control of 
the codifiers of critical theory. The novelists 
had often begun as dramatists, Lesage for one 
and Marivaux for another; and when they wrote 
fiction they did not feel any more called upon to 
relate their characters realistically to an appro- 
priate background than they had done when they 
wrote plays. It is true that Defoe (who had 
been a journalist), took keen delight in sup- 
plying all manner of descriptive details, yet 
Fielding (who had been a playwright), was 


234 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


not tempted to follow him and was content to 
project his characters almost in a void, letting 
them live and move in rooms nearly as bare of 
furniture and as uncharacteristic as was the stage 
of the time. 

Scott changed all this; he was the earliest of 
historical novelists; and when he placed his 
characters in the remote past, he was forced to 
supply the familiar details of human existence in 
the period he had chosen for his story. Scott had 
to do this necessarily, if he wanted to make his 
readers realize life in some earlier century about 
which they were likely to know little. Balzac, in 
his turn, applied the same process to the novel of 
contemporary life; he described places with in- 
tense gusto, revelling in imagining all possible 
particularities of the town, of the house, and even 
of the room, in which any one of his more vital 
characters resided. 

The interrelation of prose-fiction and the 
drama is constant; and just as the novelists of 
the eighteenth century had been content with the 
bareness to which they were accustomed in the 
theater of their own day, so the dramatists of the 
middle of the nineteenth century began to de- 
mand appropriate stage-sets for their intenser 
social dramas. “An acted play is a novel intensi- 
fied,’ said Henry James, “it realizes what the 
theater suggests, and, by paying a liberal tribute 
to the senses anticipates your possible complaint 

235 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


that your entertainment is of the meager sort 
styled intellectual.’”” The composers of acted 
plays, who knew the abiding effect which Balzac 
had achieved by the veracity of his descriptions, 
were desirous that the scenery should reinforce 
the intellectual appeal of their writing by the sen- 
sual of the things seen on the stage. 

Fortunately compliance with this demand was 
facilitated by a momentous change which took 
place in the playhouse in the years when the realis- 
tic movement was carrying all before it. In the 
course of the middle half of the nineteenth century 
the actual stage underwent a transformation. 
It was so amply lighted first by gas and then by 
electricity, that the actor had no longer to go down 
to the footlights to let his changing expression be 
seen. The parallel wings and borders by means 
of which interiors had been crudely indicated were 
abolisht and the compact box-set enabled the 
stage-director to suggest more satisfactorily an 
actual room. The apron was cut away; and the 
curtain rose and fell in a picture-frame. The 
characters of the play were thereafter elements in 
a picture, which had a characteristic background, 
and which might be furnisht with the most realis- 
tic elaboration. The former intimacy of the 
actor with the spectators, due to his close proxim- 
ity, disappeared speedily; and with this intimacy 
there disappeared also its concomitant, the solil- 
oquy addrest by a character to the audience for 

236 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


the sole purpose of supplying information. The 
drama immediately became more pictorial; it 
could rely more certainly upon gesture; it could 
renounce the aid of purely rhetorical oratory; 
it could dispense with description; and it insisted 
that the performer should subdue himself to 
those new conditions and to be on his guard lest 
he should “get out of the picture.” 

This modification of the physical conditions of 
performance, which took place between 1850 
and 1890, invited the dramatist to deal more 
directly with life; and it encouraged him to rely 
more solidly upon the purely dramatic, eschewing 
the lyric and the epic and seeking solely to pre- 
sent character immesht in situation. It stimulated 
Ibsen to the acquisition of his masterly technic 
and it supplied the stage best fitted for his austere 
inquest upon human nature. Ibsen was as in- 
sistent upon the appropriate environment for his 
characters as was Balzac; and the interior in 
which he placed any one of his several groups is 
always vigorously characteristic. The set which 
he visualized as the fit background for his creat- 
ures in the‘ Doll’s House’ would not be appropriate 
for those in ‘Hedda Gabler’ or for those in ‘ Ros- 
mersholm.’ Each of these plays has its own dread 
atmosphere, subtly indicated by significant de- 
tails. 


237 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


Ill 


Yet Ibsen, even if he was the foremost, was not 
the only outstanding figure at the beginning of 
the twentieth century. He was companioned by 
playwrights as unlike as Rostand and Haupt- 
mann and d’Annunzio. Ibsen, poet as he was 
beyond all question, wrote prose, compact and 
direct; he was a realist, altho he was also often 
a romanticist even in his severer problem-plays. 
Rostand and Hauptmann and d’Annunzio are 
rarely realistic; more often than not they are 
romanticists; and above all they are more 
frequently poetic. And here we are in sight of 
‘an answer to the question early formulated: 
Why is there so bitter a dissatisfaction with the 
complex and realistic set to which we have slowly 
become accustomed? It is because this set, suit- 
able for the staid interiors, wherein the action of 
the prosaic problem-play is slowly unrolled be- 
fore it, is less suitable for the out-door scenes of 
avowedly poetic plays. 

The realistic complexity, which elaborates a 
significant room for the characters of a social 
drama rooted in fact, cannot attain an equal 
significance when it seeks to reproduce the haunt- 
ing landscape of a romantic play flowering out 
of fantasy. It is appropriate for the ‘Ghosts’ of 
Ibsen; but it is not appropriate for the ‘Sightless’ 
of Maeterlinck or for the ‘As You Like It’ of 

238 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


Shakspere. In a word, the realistic set may be 
exactly suited to plays of real life, but it does not 
necessarily suit plays of unreal life illumined by 
the light that never was on sea or land. Even 
when ‘Twelfth Night’ or ‘Much Ado About 
Nothing’ is mounted sumptuously and tastefully 
by a stage-director of the liberality, the ingenuity 
and the interpreting imagination of Sir Henry 
Irving, the result is not commensurate with his 
effort; and the effort itself is often only too visi- 
ble. The semi-medieval stories which Shakspere 
adjusted to the jutting platform of the Tudor 
theater and which are plausible to us now only 
if we are willing to make believe, have to be taken 
apart and then put together again in contradic- 
tion and almost in defiance of Shakspere’s own 
semi-medieval construction, so that they may 
be made to adjust themselves to the copiously 
pictorial method of our modern picture-frame 
stage. After this inartistic dislocation, they are 
likely to be overloaded with decorative details 
not in harmony with their delightful unreality; 
and the more strenuously the stage-director 
strives to supply a realistic setting, the less 
real, the less actual, is the result. 

“Of pure poetry there are two kinds,” said 
Lord Dunsany in a preface for a volume of a 
friend’s verses; “that which mirrors the beauty 
of the world in which our bodies are, and that 
which builds the more mysterious kingdoms; 

239 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


where geography ends and fairyland begins, 
with gods and heroes at war, and the sirens sing- 
ing still, and Alph going down to the darkness 
from Xanadu.” In the modern drama the leader 
of those whose works mirror the beauty of the 
world in which our bodies are, is Ibsen; and the 
foremost representative of those who lay their 
plays frankly in fairyland is Maeterlinck. It 
was inevitable that there should be a reaction 
against the effort to apply the method of compli- 
cated realism to plays not compact with reality 
but compounded of fancy, insubstantial and 
etherial. 

It was inevitable also that a younger genera- 
tion should welcome a new departure for the pre- 
sentation of the poetic dramas of Shakspere and 
would endeavor to discover the means for re- 
capturing something of the simplicity of the orig- 
inal performance, and of avoiding the crushing 
and needless expense of mechanical realism. 
Inevitably again the ardor of the youthful leaders 
of this revolt would tend to be unduly impatient, 
and to be stimulated by an iconoclastic fervor 
which might tempt them to a root and branch 
reform,—to a violent revolution instead of an 
orderly evolution. They were eager to prove all 
things and yet they were not always anxious to 
hold fast that which is true. 

What was welcome in the realistic interiors of 
the problem-plays was the congruity of the back- 

/ 240 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


ground to the temper and tone of the play. 
The set which Ibsen had visualized for his somber 
‘Ghosts’ was rich in character; it was the fit en- 
vironment for his disenchanted creatures; it 
was absolutely congruous with his theme; it 
served to intensify the appalling action of his 
tragic story; and it did these things without in 
any way drawing undue attention to itself. But 
certain of the sets which Gordon Craig has de- 
signed for one or another episode of ‘Hamlet’ and 
of “Macbeth,’—indisputably beautiful in them- 
selves, truly imaginative, superbly decorative,— 
are not in keeping with the atmosphere of the 
plays; they are not unobtrusive backgrounds; 
in fact, they cry aloud to be noticed for their 
own sake. So it is also with the striking set which 
he devised for the ‘ Electra,’ bold and massive, but 
foreign to the spirit of Sophocles, hopelessly un- 
Greek, and likely to distract the attention of the 
spectators from the dramatist to the decorator. 

As we turn the pages of Gordon Craig’s ‘Art 
of the Theater,’ delighting in the designs and 
doing our best to discover his own convictions, 
we cannot avoid the suspicion that he holds the 
decorator to be superior to the dramatist and 
that he believes the control of the theater should 
pass from the playwright-poet to the painter. 
Surely it ought to be obvious that the dramatist 
is the ultimate master of the stage and that the 
artists whose aid he may invite must be his ser- 

241 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


vants. Beauty of line and of color are in place 
in the theater only when they contribute to the 
emotional and intellectual appeal of the play 
itself; and they are out of place whenever they 
are permitted to obtrude themselves, to inter- 
fere with this appeal and to detract from it. 


IV 


Arter the raising of the banner of revolt against 
the costly and unsatisfactory realistic set, there 
were many signs of unrest in the theaters of many 
countries, notably in those of Russia and of 
Germany. Stage-directors of varying ability 
ventured upon all sorts of interesting experi- 
ments. Some of these novelties approved them- 
selves immediately and won acceptance as tend- 
ing toward the development of a more satisfac- 
tory mode of presenting the poetic drama; but 
some of them were abhorrent, being incited ap- 
parently by an egotistic desire to be different at 
all costs, to be eccentric or even to be frankly 
freakish. We find ourselves in a period of transi- 
tion; and while we are justified in looking forward 
hopefully, we cannot now clearly descry the goal 
at the end of the winding path upon which we 
have entered. 

But we know our point of departure, even if we 
cannot yet foresee where we shall arrive or when; 
and already can we find full justification for the 

242 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


reaction against the persistent practice of sup- 
plying complicated realism for plays the action 
of which does not take place in the realm of real- 
ity. There was, for example, a noble dignity in 
the bold archway wherewith Sam Hume indicated 
the city-gate for a Detroit production of Lord 
Dunsany’s ‘Tents of the Arabs,’ a design which 
had a distinct beauty of its own but which was 
also absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the 
play,—altho a hypercritic might regret that the 
arch itself was Roman rather than Arabic or 
even vaguely oriental. Quite as effective in its 
stark simplicity was the lovely scene designed by 
Hamilton Bell for the ‘Sister Beatrice’ of Maeter- 
linck when it was produced by Winthrop Ames 
at the New Theater,—a medieval entrance-hall, 
devoid of all distracting detail and provided with 
a tall door at the back, ready to open once to 
reveal the dark sky with its stars shining down 
on the stalwart figure of the lover come to carry 
off the enamored nun. 

A like feeling for the fitness of things, for the 
delicately artistic adjustment of the setting to the 
soul of the play, was discoverable also in the 
two contrasting scenes which Winthrop. Ames 
caused to be prepared for that enchanting pan- 
tomime ‘Pierrot the Prodigal.’ One of these 
sets represented the unpretentious home from 
which the erring son goes forth and to which 
he returns at last with a broken and a contrite 

243 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


heart,—a low ceilinged room, summarily yet 
adequately indicated with only the furnishings 
necessary to the action; and the other set, equally 
successful in its significance, was the temporary 
abode of the prodigal when he has yielded to the 
lure of the lady of pleasure,—a loftier room, 
seemingly more spacious, sumptuously extrava- 
gant in its ornament and yet achieving a char- 
acter of its own without the aid of a clutter of 
insignificant details. 

The names of the personages and the final 
flourish of the tricolor flag when the drums rattle 
past and the fifes shrill out, inform us that the 
action of ‘Pierrot the Prodigal’ must be supposed 
to take place Somewhere In France; and it is 
also somewhere in France that a certain Man mar- 
ried a Dumb Wife. The vicissitudes of his 
misadventure were narrated by Rabelais four 
hundred years ago and they were only recently 
cast into dialog by Anatole France; yet the in- 
felicitous wedding did not happen in the twentieth 
century or in the sixteenth, but in the dim and 
distant epoch known as Once upon a Time. 
As a matter of fact, the consequences of this 
marriage are so fantastic, so completely removed 
from the restraints of reality, that we cannot 
help knowing that they never did happen any- 
where or anywhen,—a knowledge which in no 
wise interferes with our enjoyment. For this 
inconsequent impossibility Robert E. Jones 

244 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


invented a singe set, at once exterior and in- 
terior, charming in color and playful in design, 
perfectly n accord with the tricksy comicality 
of the play and reinforcing the humorous unreal- 
ity of the story. No such house as that which 
we were invited to gaze upon had ever been built 
by the hand of man; and yet we accepted it 
instantly as the only possible habitation for the 
Man and for his Dumb Wife. In fact, this com- 
pletely satisfactory setting was designed in per- 
fect accord with the principle this artist has him- 
self declared: “Scenery isn’t there to be lookt at, 
it’s really there to be forgotten. The drama is 
the fire, the scenery is the air that lifts the fire 
and makes it bright.” 

The Rabelais-France farce was produced in 
New York by Granville Barker, and it was by far 
the most successful of his experiments, several 
of which were a little too regardless of traditional 
methods and a little too idiosyncratic in their 
insistence on novelty for its own sake. The 
set of the ‘Dumb Wife’ did not attract attention to 
itself, whereas in the same manager’s production 
of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ both the 
scenes and the costumes shriekt aloud, because 
they seemed to American audiences out of keep- 
ing with the spirit of Shakspere’s fairy fantasy. 
The same criticism would have to be past on 
the powerfully projected backgrounds which 
were prepared by Golsovine for a Russian produc- 

245 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


tion of the ‘Festin de Pierre’ and which were not 
consonant with the restrained tone of Moliére’s 
version of the Don Juan story, altho they might 
have been in place if used to adorn the lyric 
melodrama of Tirso de Molina, the remote 
original of Moliére’s piece. 


Vv 


In the immediate future it is probable that the 
poetic drama, Shakspere’s or Maeterlinck’s, will 
be presented in our theaters far less realistically 
and far less expensively. We shall no longer 
expect a spectacle as glittering, as costly and as 
cumbrous as the reproduction of Paul Veronese’s 
‘Marriage at Cana’ which Augustin Daly be- 
stowed upon the final act of the ‘Taming of the 
Shrew.’ It is also probable that this simplifi- 
cation, this renunciation of ultra-realism, this 
substitution of indication, summary but ade- 
quate, for actual representation, may in time 
affect even the mounting of modern plays in 
prose. This will not necessarily prove to be an 
improvement. A British critic once found fault 
with Ibsen because he used the fittest words 
and not the most beautiful; and Ibsen insisted on 
the fittest backgrounds for his social dramas, 
and not the most beautiful. In the mounting of 
the modern problem-play what is essential is not 
beauty for its own sake, but character, 

246 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


There is always danger that the effort to 
achieve the characteristic may over-reach itself 
with disastrous results. In a letter to Sarcey on 
the art of stage-management Dumas fils recorded 
his preference for a very simple interior with as 
little furniture as possible, all in neutral tones, 
against which the personages would stand out in 
vigorous relief; and he was not at all pleased 
with the single set which Montigny devised for 
the three acts of ‘Monsieur Alphonse.’ As the 
action took place in the country-house of a 
retired naval officer, the manager imagined a 
room with an exotic decoration vaguely Chinese 
and with bamboo furniture, most of which was 
painted a brilliant red. “The effect was original 
and gay, when the stage was empty; but none 
the less it suggested a bird-cage . . . and one 
was moved to wonder whether the persons of the 
play would not sooner or later begin to hop from 
perch to perch.” 

Dumas, a born playwright, demanded always 
that the decorative should be subordinate to the 
dramatic. “If we insist on being original, and 
on being different, we are in imminent danger of 
being eccentric and of bringing about an antagon- 
ism between the subject of the play and its 
scenery.” It was this unfortunate desire to be 
original and to be different which recently mis- 
led an American manager into entrusting a New 
York house-decorator with the designing of the 

247 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


successive sets for the ‘New York Idea.’ Lang- 
don Mitchell’s heroine in the first act is about to 
marry into a family of hereditary dulness; and 
being herself a delightfully lively person, she re- 
turns, in the last act, to the husband she has 
divorced. But the uninspired house-decorator 
did not provide the opening act with an interior of 
transcendent respectability nor did he bestow 
upon the closing scene an interior of contrasting 
levity. There was not actual antagonism be- 
tween the subject of the play and its scenery, 
but there was certainly no harmony. The in- 
teriors were in no wise characteristic of the 
persons who were supposed to live in them; in fact 
the only character that they had was that of the 
house-decorator’s own shop. 

No such blunder was made by David Belasco 
in the single set of the ‘Return of Peter Grimm’— 
perhaps the most extreme example of realistic 
complexity, with its unending details, all charac- 
teristic, all unobtrusive and all congruous with 
the topic of the play. The room which the 
author-manager set before us is the room in 
which Peter Grimm would live; it is the house 
in which he would die; and it is the home to 
which he would return after death. The at- 
mosphere of the whole dwelling, as we breathe 
it, is in perfect accord with the appealing per- 
sonality of the forlorn ghost. To simplify this 
set would be to deprive it of the value given 

248 


THE SIMPLIFICATION OF STAGE-SCENERY 


to it by the intuition and the dexterity of its 
designer. 

Yet Belasco, always alert to perceive the possi- 
bilities of every new development in the art 
of the stage, has more recently bestowed upon 
‘Marie-Odile’ a very simple setting in accord 
with its simpler theme; and so dexterously did 
he select the sparse elements of this rarer and less 
encumbered scene, that there was no diminu- 
tion in the pictorial support of the story. In 
both cases Belasco workt in obedience to the 
unchanging law which declares that it is the 
perfection of a woman’s dress to make its wearer 
look her best without in any way attracting at- 
tention to itself. 

The dominating principle in putting a drama 
on the stage is plain enough. Every play ought 
to be provided with the specific background 
which will best serve to bring out its own special 
quality. A brilliant comedy of modern society 
like Clyde Fitch’s ‘Truth’ will call for a scenic 
investiture more complex than would be appro- 
priate for a fleeting episode like Lady eee ean 
‘Rising of the Moon,’ 

It is not often that the author himself is as 
willing to leave the choice of method to the pro- 
ducer as Echegaray disclosed himself to be in 
the directions prefixt to his one-act piece, the 
‘Street Singer’ :—“ The stage represents a square 
or a street. There may or may not be trees; 

249 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


there may or may not be seats; there may or may 
not be lighted lamps. The only thing which is 
essential is the wall of a house facing the spectators 
so that the Beggars and the Singer may take their 
places against it. The time is night.” 


(1918.) 


250 


XIV 


THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW- 
BUSINESS 


I 


VERY art has, and has to have, its own 
special and highly specialized vocabulary, 
ample for its own needs and therefore abounding 
in words and terms and phrases, often startlingly 
strange to those who are unfamiliar with the 
technicalities devised by its practitioners. The 
electricians, for example, make use of a heterogeny 
of vocables unknown to the profane and sometimes 
fearfully and wonderfully made. I recall that I 
once saw in an electrical weekly an advertisement 
asserting the superiority of the manufacturer’s 
“separately excited boosters’’; and when | con- 
sulted an electrical expert he informed me that 
these were very useful machines and that their 
name exactly described their purpose. This 
explanation did not lift me out of my ignorance; 
but when it was too late to retaliate | wondered 
whether I could not have had him at an equal 
disadvantage if I had askt him if he knew what 
a star-trap was or a raking-piece, a run-down or a 
baby-spot. 1 think that he would have been as 
251 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


much puzzled by these terms, well-known to all 
who are wont to pass thru the stage-door, as | 
was bewildered by the excitability of boosters. 

The theater has an elaborate terminology of its 
own, completely adequate to its manifold necessi- 
ties, and as precise in its meaning and as accurate 
in its application as the vocabulary of any of the 
sciences. To the outsider the technicalities of the 
stage are likely to be as mysterious as those of 
any other department of human activity,—as 
mysterious and as misleading. A star-trap, for 
example, is not intended for the sole use of a star ‘ 
on the contrary it is a mechanical device the 
obvious dangers of which no star would ever be 
called upon to risk. A baby-spot carries with it 
no suggestion that a stage infant is about to break 
out with the measles; and a run-down does not 
imply that anybody is in need of medical treat- 
ment. Nor has a raking-piece anything what- 
ever to do with gardening. 

In the prosaic eighteenth century, it was held 
to be good form in speaking and in writing to use 
general terms so far as possible and to avoid the 
use of specific technicalities. But in our more 
imaginative twentieth century we relish the exact 
word and we delight in employing it with ab- 
solute scientific precision. Rudyard Kipling re- 
vealed himself as a man of his own time when 
he made use of the special terms of engineering, 
as he did in prose in ‘007’ and in verse in ‘M’An- 

252 


THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS 


drews’ Hymn.’ Perhaps no other of our poets 
and story-tellers has gone so far in this direction 
as Kipling; and yet many of them are tending 
that way, to the constant enrichment of our every- 
day speech as this is necessarily replenisht from 
the highly specialized vocabularies of the several 
arts and sciences. 

It is not uncommon to hear the technicalities 
of the theater contemptuously thrust aside as 
merely the slang of the stage. Now, no doubt, 
the stage has its slang; indeed, there is no deny- 
ing that stage-folk are plentifully supplied with 
the fleeting phrases which may fairly be dis- 
mist as slang. But none the less has the theater 
a vocabulary of its own, as rigid in its meaning 
and as legitimate in its usage as the vocabulary 
of electricity or of architecture. No one is jus- 
tified in denouncing baby-spot and _ star-trap, 
raking-piece and run-down as specimens of 
merely ephemeral slang. These terms have a 
scientific precision as indisputable as horse-power 
or foot-ton or kilo-wait; they are as necessary 
and they are as deserving of collection and of 
definition as the terms of painting or of sculpture, 
of chemistry or of medicine. 

It is a curious thing that these technicalities 
of the theater are only a few of them to be found 
even in the largest and most comprehensive of 
the dictionaries of the English language; and it 
is even more curious that they have never been 

253 


vf THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


assiduously selected and set in order in a subordi- 
nate dictionary of their own. Similar vocabularies 
have been prepared for the art of painting, for 
example, and for the science of medicine; and an 
ample proportion of the specific terms of painting 
and of medicine have been included in the larger 
dictionaries of the language as a whole. It is 
to be hoped that some man of letters, some jour- 
nalist intimately acquainted with the things of the 
theater, may some day be moved to undertake 
the task of preparing a stage-glossary, of collect- 
ing and of defining the vocabulary of the arts of 
the stage—playwriting, acting, scene-painting, 
stage-management. 


II 


THE task will prove to be more arduous and 
more onerous than would appear at first sight, 
since it ought not to be limited to the theater 
itself but should be made to include also the 
special vocabularies of all the other departments 
of the show-business, not only pantomime and 
dancing, but the circus and negro-minstrelsy, the 
variety-show and the moving-picture. Each of 
these departments of the show-business has words 
and phrases of its own, many of them more or less 
unknown in the others and all of them needing 
explanatory definition. We want to be able to 
turn to this glossary for the precise description of 
Leotard-body, for example, and of Risley-act. 

254 


THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS 


We shall be glad to have an exact explanation of 
the circus-act known as‘‘Pete Jenkins,’’—most hu- 
morously described by Mark Twain in ‘Huckle- 
berry Finn.’ And how many of us know what 
a tranka is or how the batoute of the circus differs 
from the springboard of the gymnasium?P We 
may be able to guess at the meaning of big top, 
and of canvas-man; we may hazard a conjecture 
as to the exact significance of giant-swing and of 
muscle-grind; but not a few of us would grope in 
the dark vainly if we were suddenly asked for 
an explanation of Jashells (which are the ropes 
making taut the rod wherefrom a trapeze is 
suspended). Then there is mechanic, which the 
outsider recognizes as a name applied to a human 
being and which the circus insider knows as the 
name of a machine used in the training of riders 
for the ring. 

However outlandish these terms may seem to 
those inexperienced in the life led by the itin- 
erant tent-dwellers, they are so familiar and so 
usual to the circus man that he would probably 
be surprised to learn that they were unfamiliar 
to the immense majority of mankind who are 
only spectators of the sports of the arena and not 
participants therein. Altho the circus has a host 
of these special terms, perhaps more than any 
other subdivision of the show-business except the 
theater itself, other subdivisions have also their 
full share. While the vogue of the circus reveals 

; 255 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAY¥YMAKING 


no sign of diminishing, the popularity of negro- 
minstrelsy has undergone an eclipse in recent 
years. Half-a-century ago there were two dozen 
or two score troupes touring the country season 
after season, whereas there are now fewer than 
half-a-score and perhaps even fewer than a scant 
half-dozen. 

No longer does the big drum invite us to “ 4o. 
Count them. 40” and very rarely do we listen 
to the preliminary request of the middleman: 
“Gentlemen, be seated !’? Only occasionally now 
do we see the the semi-circle of burnt-cork counte- 
nances with the unfailingly dignified znterlocutor 
in the center and with Bones and Tambo at the 
extremities. Here in the United States, where 
negro-minstrelsy was born, Bones and Tambo are 
known as end-men, whereas in Great Britain, to 
which the black-face entertainment was trans- 
ported early in its career, they are always called 
corner-men. Not often now does the First Part 
end with the accustomed walk around; and only 
infrequently in these days is the Second Part 
described as an olio. Still rarer is our oppor- 
tunity to behold the break-down, rendered more 
difficult and more amazing by the use of flappers, 
or to gaze delighted on a statue clog-dance, with 
its rhythm tinklingly accentuated by the em- 
ployment of clinkers. Vanisht also is the street 
parade which made it necessary that the play- 
ers of the stringed instruments should be able 

256 


THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS 


to double in brass, as the advertisements in- 
sisted. 


Ill 


THE picturesqueness of the vocabulary of the 
circus and of the minstrel-show is undeniable; 
and those of us who are keenly interested in the 
multiform developments of the English language 
cannot fail to regret that this vocabulary has not 
received from the lexicographers the attention it 
deserves. Probably the most obvious reason for 
their neglect is their ignorance of its existence. 
The most obvious of reasons for their ignorance 
is that the technical terms of the several sub- 
divisions of the show-business do not often find 
themselves set down in black and white. They 
exist and they survive by word of mouth only; 
and there is rarely any actual need to write them 
down. Even when they may get themselves 
written out, this is likely to be only in a tem- 
porary list drawn up by a prompter or a stage- 
manager. Of course, they are freely employed 
in the friendly letters of the stage-folk one to 
another. But these letters and these lists, when 
they have served their immediate purpose, are 
very unlikely to get into print or even to be pre- 
served. 

Not often actually written, the technicalities 
of the theater even less frequently appear on the 
printed page where they might chance to meet 

257 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


the eye of the dictionary-maker. Doubtless, 
there are a host of stage-terms which have been 
used orally for years without ever finding them- 
selves in print. Thus it is that they have never 
had a chance to excite the curiosity of the lexi- 
cographers. The vocabularies of engineering and 
of medicine are preserved in the many text-books 
constantly pouring from the press for the benefit 
of the students of these two arts; and so it is 
that they are brought to the attention of the alert 
scouts of linguistic research, always desirous of 
multiplying the number of new words to be in- 
cluded in the newest editions and in the latest 
supplements of their dictionaries. But no college 
has yet been tempted to give a course in stage- 
craft; and there are no technical schools requiring 
text-books for the instruction of novices in the 
various branches of the show-business. There are 
examinations for the license to practise law and 
medicine; but admission to all the departments 
of the show-business is free. The stage-door 
stands open to all, no diploma being demanded 
from actor or acrobat, dancer or pantomimist. 

It is true that the vocabulary of the show- 
business is necessarily employed more or less by 
writers of fiction when they venture to take their 
heroes and their heroines from among the show- 
folk. But the novelists who have chosen to deal 
with life behind the scenes are rarely equipt with 
an intimate knowledge of that dim region and 

258 


THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS 


they are not likely to feel themselves called upon 
to present the everyday details of the theatrical 
career with the aid of the special vocabulary of 
the stage. I suppose that | must have read at 
least a hundred stories of theatrical life, long and 
short; and I doubt if there could be gleaned from 
them all more than half-a-hundred of the tech- 
nical terms of the theater. And while novels of 
the stage are many, novels of the circus are few 
and novels of the minstrel-show are non-existent. 
Just at present the writers of fiction seem to have 
a particular fancy for the moving-picture; and 
they are making plain to new readers the methods 
and the mysteries of the art of the screen, still 
in process of rapid development. These readers 
are enlightened as to the heroine’s endeavor to 
register her swiftly changing emotions and as 
to her efforts to avoid wasting film. They are 
told what a close-up is; they are informed as to 
the precise moment when the director tells the 
camera-man to shoot; and they may even be 
instructed as to the meaning of a necessary but 
entirely new verb made out of an old noun,—the 
verb to panoram. 


IV 


RAPIDLY expanding as the vocabulary of the 
moving-picture studio may be, rich as the vocab- 
ulary of the variety-show may be, ample 
as the vocabulary of the circus already is, 

259 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


no one of them is as full and as varied as the 
vocabulary of the theater itself,—a vocabulary 
having its remoter origins in the rude mysteries 
of the Middle Ages, expanding steadily in the 
professional playhouse of Elizabeth and James, 
enlarging itself again in the roofed and artificially 
lighted theaters of the Restoration, gaining a 
further elaboration in the eighteenth-century 
theater with the development of scene-painting 
by De Loutherburg, and attaining to its present 
complexity after the invention of the electric 
light had aided in the substitution of our present 
picture-frame stage for the apron-stage of a 
hundred years ago. 

The unlearned reader of Henslowe’s diary is 
likely to wonder what matter of property it was 
which he there finds catalogued as “z Hell- 
mouth.’ The inquiring reader of Ford’s plays 
is interested to discover that this dramatist in 
one of his pieces calls for the use of a “chair with 
an engine,’—the context making it evident that 
this was a trick-chair, with concealed arms which 
flew forward to imprison the unsuspicious sitter 
whenever the villain released the secret spring. 
The intelligent reader of Shakspere who abandons 
our misleading library editions, with their modern- 
ized stage-directions, and who turns to the original 
folios and quartos, can gather a significant collec- 
tion of Elizabethan stage-technicalities, which he 
will find helpful to a proper understanding of the 

260 


THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS 


conditions of theatrical performance in Tudor 
days. In ‘Julius Cesar,’ for example, when the 
time comes for Mark Antony to deliver his address 
to the Roman populace we are informed that “he 
goes up into the pulpit’’—that is to say into a 
crude and conventionalized rostrum perfectly 
satisfactory to the groundlings who stood restless 
in the unroofed yard. 

This intelligent reader of Shakspere may how- 
ever find himself a little at a loss when he comes 
to the ‘Taming of the Shrew’ and when he finds 
that at a certain moment the stage-direction 
declares “enter the drunkard above.’ ‘The 
context however will make it plain that the 
drunkard is Christopher Sly; and any text-book 
of the Tudor theater will inform him that “‘to 
enter above” meant to appear in the gallery over 
the stage so that the actor could look down on 
the action taking place on the broad platform 
below. The Elizabethan “‘to enter above’ must 
not be confounded with our modern “‘to go up 
stage” which means to go further back from the 
footlights just as “‘to come down” means to ap- 
proach them. If however this Shaksperian reader 
meets with the unfamiliar word traverse, he will 
consult the text-books in vain for a satisfactory 
explanation, since we have not yet ascertained 
exactly what kind of a scenic appliance this term 
designated. 

The compiler of the much to be wisht for his- 

261 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


torical dictionary of theatrical terms, ancient and 
modern, will make it plain that the word clown 
did not connote to the Elizabethans what it did 
to the Victorians. It did not mean an acrobatic 
humorist of the circus or a comic character in a 
pantomime. It was in fact almost the exact 
equivalent of low comedian, of the performer 
who undertakes the broadly comic parts, the ac- 
cepted funmaker of the company, certain to pro- 
voke a ready laugh merely by his welcome ap- 
pearance even before he has crackt his first joke. 
That there were recognized “lines of business”’ in 
the English theater while Shakspere was writing 
for it is indisputable; but except in this single 
case of the clown we do not know what they were 
called. It seems likely that in the company of 
the Globe theater Condell played heavies and 
that some unidentified but brilliant performer was 
entrusted with the light-comedy parts. But we 
have no information as to the names given to these 
two lines of business or even if they had then any 
specific name. As the Tudor actors had become 
professional only a few years before Shakspere 
went on the stage, it is probable that they had 
not yet been forced to invent a long list of tech- 
nical terms, altho they must have had many 
which have not come down to us. 


262 


THE VOCABULARY OF THE SHOW-BUSINESS 


Vv 


In the course of the past three centuries and 
a half the theater has solidly establisht itself; 
it has undergone many changes; and its vocab- 
ulary has been multiplied in response to vary- 
ing conditions. Shakspere was used to an octag- 
onal playhouse, open to the sky, with a platform 
jutting into the yard. His stage was encumbered 
by the gallants who sat on both sides, smoking 
their long pipes. It had abundant properties but 
it had absolutely no scenery, as we now under- 
stand the word. The machinery was extremely - 
simple and primitive. As the playwrights sought 
for as much spectacle as was possible on their 
bare stage, and as they delighted in storms— 
there are three of these in ‘ King Lear,’—probably 
their theater had devices akin to the wind- 
machine and the thunder-barrel. But Shakspere 
would be badly puzzled if he could come back to 
hear a producer of our own time talk about the 
wings or the flies, about tormentors and border- 
lights, about panorama-grooves and cyclorama- 
drops. 

While Shakspere could not possibly have fore- 
seen these terms descriptive of our latter-day 
complexity of stage-decoration, he would find 
it easy enough to arrive at the significance of 
phrases which dealt rather with the art of the 
actor. He would not take long to ascertain that 

263 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


one performer confines himself to straight business 
or that another performer had a part that played 
itself. He would appreciate the compliment 
when he was assured that certain plays of his, 
‘Hamlet’ for one and ‘As You Like It’ for an- 
other, were actor-proof. He would be inclined to 
praise the actor, who was always letter-perfect, 
who never failed to get a band, whose popu- 
larity was so great that no piece in which he ap- 
peared was ever a frost, and whose memory was 
so good that he never dried up. 

Men who rarely or never enter the theater will 
be found declaring that a certain politician is 
only an understudy, altho he is always seeking to 
get himself in the spotlight, thereby making a 
three-ring circus of himself. In an incriminat- 
ing letter one American statesman asserted that 
he would not be found “a dead head in the enter- 
prize’; and another American statesman, when 
he was a candidate for the presidency, was loudly 
advertized as “the advance-agent of prosperity.” 


(1917.) 


264 


XV 
MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


I 


HOSE of us who are now sexagenarians and 

who had the good fortune to make acquain- 
tance with ‘Essays in Criticism’ in our undergradu- 
ate days and to read the successive collections of 
Matthew Arnold’s later criticisms as they ap- 
peared one by one in the score of years that fol- 
lowed, can never forget the debt we owe to the 
critic who opened our eyes to the value of culture, 
to the purpose of criticism and to the duty of 
“seeing the thing as it is.’ We felt an increasing 
stimulus as we came to know Arnold’s writings 
more intimately, as we absorbed them, as we made 
his ideas our own, as we sought to apply his 
principles and to borrow his methods. The 
influence of Arnold’s work upon the generation 
born in the middle of the nineteenth century was 
immediate and it has been enduring. 

“Without in the least over-rating himself,’ 
so Brownell has finely phrased it, Arnold “took 
himself with absolute seriousness, and his work 
from first to last is informed with the high sin- 
cerity of a consistent purpose—the purpose of 

265 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


being nobly useful to his time and country by 
preaching to men precisely the gospel he conceived 
they most vitally needed. For the consideration 
of his public and his era he deemed energy less 
important than light, earnestness less needful than 
sweetness, genius less beneficent than reasonable- 
ness, erudition less called for than culture.” He 
preacht always persuasively, making his points 
sharply and often tipping them with wit that 
they might penetrate the more swiftly. He knew 
so certainly what he wanted to prove that it was 
easy for him always to be clear. His style, one 
of the most delightful in the whole range of English 
literature, is ever limpid, pellucid, transparent. 
As he was directly addressing the public of 
his own era, he constantly dealt with the themes of 
immediate interest to his contemporaries in his 
own country. So it is that a large proportion of 
his writing, always indisputably literary in its 
treatment, is now discovered to be sometimes 
journalistic in its theme. Whatever interest his 
discussion of the Burials Bill, and of the Deceased 
Wife’s Sister's Bill, may have had when 
these topics were being hotly debated in the 
House of Commons, has evaporated now that 
the passage of years has deprived them of their 
pertinency. Moreover, even in writing his es- 
says on questions of permanent importance, the 
question of secondary education, for example, and 
the question of the classics against the sciences, 
266 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


Arnold was so eager to catch the attention of his 
contemporaries that he never hesitated to make 
use of illustrations from the happenings of the 
moment, likely to be a little unintelligible to 
readers of a later generation. 

To say this is to suggest that he yielded a little 
too much and a little too often to the temptation 
of an instantaneous and fleeting effect, and that 
there are passages in his writings, and not a few 
of them, which will be obscure to readers of the 
twentieth century without an annotation almost 
as abundant as that which does not prevent 
Pope’s ‘Dunciad’ from being unreadable. The 
fact is that Arnold, although essentially a man 
of letters, had a hankering after the newspaper, 
after the direct and evanescent impression of 
journalism. His essays were publisht in maga- 
zines and reviews; and the magazine,—and the 
review also—is always alert to capture the ele- 
ment of timeliness; it is at best only a bridge 
between literature and journalism. ‘Friend- 
ship’s Garland,’ one of the most amusing of Ar- 
nold’s books and one in which he most completely 
exprest certain of his opinions, was originally 
contributed to a daily paper, the Pall Mall Ga- 
zette, at irregular intervals during the years 1866 
to 1870. It is true that the Pall Mall Gazette, 
while under the control of its founder, Frederick 
Greenwood, and afterward when it was edited by 
John Morley, was the most literary of London 

267 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


journals, rivalling in this respect the Temps and 
the Débats of Paris. To this evening journal, 
appealing to the better sort of newspaper readers, 
Arnold continued to contribute from time to 
time brief articles on literary and educational 
topics, most of which he did not care to preserve 
in his successive volumes, and only half-a-dozen 
of which have been included even in the more 
or less complete édition de luxe of his prose and 
verse publisht in fifteen volumes in 1903-4 and 
limited to seven hundred and fifty copies. 

Among these newspaper contributions rescued 
in this limited edition are a valuable note on 
George Sand (whom he rated higher than Bal- 
zac), and a series of five letters from ‘An Old 
Playgoer,’ written between December, 1882, and 
October, 1884. These five letters represent his 
sole venture into the field of theatrical criticism, 
—excepting only the very interesting paper on the 
“French Play in London,’ evoked by the visit of 
the Comédie-Frangaise to England in 1879. This 
single essay and these five brief letters are the 
only evidences of Arnold’s keen interest in the 
theater. He was a constant playgoer,—unlike 
Sainte-Beuve, in whose footsteps he followed 
loyally and who seems to have cared little for the 
acted drama, altho he was always character- 
istically acute and felicitous in his criticism of 
Moliére and of the other masters of the French 
stage. 

268 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


Born in 1822, Matthew Arnold was old enough 
to have witnessed the final appearances of the last 
of the Kemble brotherhood; and in one of the 
Pall Mall Gazette letters he recorded his opinion 
that the Benedick of Charles Kemble was superior 
to that of Henry Irving. “I remember how in my 
youth,” he confest in his paper.on the perform- 
ances of the Comédie-Frangaise, “after a first 
sight of the divine Rachel at the Edinburgh 
theater, in the part of Hermione, | followed her to 
Paris, and for two months never missed one of her 
performances.” No doubt it was this intensive 
study of the great actress which inspired his three 
noble sonnets on Rachel. 

One can glean from his publisht corre- 
spondence a sparse record of his occasional visits 
to the theater in England and on the continent,— 
records often accompanied by his off-hand judg- 
ments of the plays and of the players whom he 
beheld. In February, 1861, he saw Charles 
Fechter as Othello: “the first two acts I thought 
poor (Shakspere’s fault, partly), the next two ef- 
fective, and the last pretty well.” In April, 
1864, he accepted an invitation to see Kate Bate- 
man as Leah, adding that he had already seen 
“most of the things that are being given now.” 
In March, 1865, he went with his family to see 
Sothern as Lord Dundreary. In November, 
1874, he writes that he much wanted to see ‘Ham- 
let’? (which Irving was then acting); and in 

269 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


February, 1876, he tells his sister that he is going 
to see “that gibbering performance, as | fear it is, 
Irving’s Othello.” Nearly ten years later in 
November, 1885, he saw ‘Othello’ at the Royal 
Theater in Berlin: —“horrid! but I wanted for 
once to see Shakspere in German.”’ And a year 
after, in March, 1886, when he was again in Ger- 
many, he reported that he was going “a great deal 
to the theaters, the acting is so good”’ (this was 
in Munich). 


II 


In 1856, when he was thirty-four, he seems to 
have planned a closet-drama on a Roman theme; 
“T am full of a tragedy of the time of the end of 
the Republic—one of the most colossal times of 
the world, I think. . . . It won’t see the light, 
however, before 1857.’”’ It never has seen the 
light; and when 1857 arrived it found him at 
work on a closet-drama on a Greek theme, the 
“Merope’ which he was to publish in 1858. Ashe 
was engaged in rehandling a story already dealt 
with by Euripides, Maffei, Voltaire and Alfieri, 
Arnold wisely undertook an analysis of the 
dramaturgic methods of the greatest and the most 
skilful of all the Attic dramatists: “what I learn 
in studying Sophocles for my present purpose is, 
or seems to me, wonderful; so far exceeding all 
that one would learn in years’ reading of him with- 
out such a purpose.” 

270 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


In the preface to his collected ‘Poems,’ issued 
in 1853, he had discust the poet’s choice of a 
theme. He did not cite but he echoed Voltaire’s 
assertion that the success of a tragedy depends on 
its subject. In fact, Arnold is discussing poetry 
at large and not dramatic poetry only, yet the 
principle he laid down applies with special force to 
the drama: “the poet has in the first place to 
select an excellent action; and what actions are 
the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most 
powerfully appeal to the great primary human 
affections: to those elementary feelings which sub- 
sist permanently in the race, and which are in- 
dependent of time.” 

In the preface to ‘Merope’ itself, written five 
years later, Arnold sought to justify his selection 
of a Greek action, and his attempt to present this 
action as he imagined it would have been pre- 
sented by a Greek dramatist. He described the 
origin and development of Greek tragedy, proving 
his knowledge of its principles. Yet in the play 
itself he was unable to apply these principles 
successfully. He lackt both the native dramatic 
genius and the acquired theatrical talent. Ina 
letter of February, 1858, to his sister, he exprest 
his dissatisfaction with the adverse criticisms of 
his dramatic poem, which were the result largely 
of his own argumentative preface: “Instead of 
reading it for what it is worth, everybody begins 
to consider whether it does not betray a design to 

271 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


substitute tragedies a la grecque for every other 
kind of poetical composition in England, and falls 
into an attitude of violent resistance to such an 
imaginary design. What I meant them to see in 
it was a specimen of the world created by the 
Greek imagination. This imagination was dif- 
ferent from our own, and it is hard for us to appre- 
ciate, even to understand it; but it had a peculiar 
power, grandeur, and dignity, and these are worth 
trying to get an apprehension of.” 

What Arnold himself failed to perceive is that 
the peculiar power, grandeur and dignity of the 
Greek imagination can best be apprehended by a 
study of the tragedies written by the Greeks them- 
selves and that there was no need for him or for 
any other Englishman to try to beat the Attic 
tragedians on their own ground and with their 
own weapons. After all, the most satisfactory 
Greek tragedies are and must be those written by 
the Greeks, as the most satisfactory Elizabethan 
dramas are those written by the Elizabethans. 
The action of ‘Merope’ might be excellent; it 
might “most powerfully appeal to the great 
primary human affections’”’; but it could exert 
this appeal upon a modern audience only if it were 
presented in accord with modern conditions. The 
theme of ‘Merope’ might have a universal and 
perennial interest, but the form which Matthew 
Arnold gave it was only local and temporary, 
however superb it might have been when it had 

272 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


evolved spontaneously from the special conditions 
of theatrical performance in Athens. Further- 
more, with all his liking for the acted drama, 
Arnold in composing ‘ Merope’ was not thinking 
of performance in any theater, he was creating 
only a closet-drama, a still-born offspring of the 
Muse. A play which is not intended to be played 
is a contradiction in terms; it is an overt ab- 
surdity, no matter how greatly gifted the poet 
may be who deceives himself in the vain effort to 
achieve the truly dramatic without taking into 
account the theater, in which only can the true 
drama be born. 

Eight years later he seems to have been on the 
verge of repeating his blunder and of again wast- 
ing his effort in an attempt foredoomed to failure. 
In March, 1866, he wrote to his mother that he 
was troubled to find that Tennyson was at work 
on a subject, the story of the Latin poet Lucretius, 
which he himself had been occupied with for 
some twenty years: “I was going to make a 
tragedy out of it... . I shall probably go on 
with it, but it is annoying, the more so as I cannot 
possibly go on at present so as to be ready this 
year, but must wait till next.’ Fortunately for 
himself he did not go on; and before the next year 
came the project of a tragedy on Lucretius had 
joined the earlier project of the tragedy “of the 
time of the end of the Republic.” In the first 
planned dramatic poem there might have been the 

273 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


stuff out of which a true tragedy could be made, 
even if Arnold was not the man to make it; but 
the subject of the later Roman poem seems hope- 
lessly infertile. It is true that Moliére was in- 
tensely interested in Lucretius, and Moliére was a 
born playwright; but all that Moliére planned to 
do was to make a French translation of the great 
work of Lucretius; and the Latin poet would 
never have suggested himself to the French drama- 
tist as the possible hero of a tragedy. 


Ill 


Witn Arnold’s persistent desire to use the dra- 
matic form, with his lively curiosity as to the prin- 
ciples of playmaking and with his unfailing in- 
terest in the art of acting, we may well wonder 
why it is that no one of his more elaborate critical 
studies was devoted to any of the great dramatists. 
There are the lofty sonnets on Sophocles and on 
Shakspere; but there is no single study of Soph- 
ocles or of Shakspere or of Moliére. Scattered 
thru his essays are many penetrating bits of 
criticism upon one or another of the playwrights 
of Europe. In the essay, ‘A French Critic on 
Goethe,’ for example, there is an illuminating 
comparison of Goethe’s ‘Goetz von Berlichingen’ 
with Schiller’s ‘Robbers.’ Arnold quoted the 
assertion of a British critic that “there was some- 
thing which prevented Goethe from ever becom- 

274 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


ing a great dramatist; he could never lose him- 
self sufficiently in his creations.” And on this 
Arnold commented that it is in ‘Goetz’ that 
Goethe loses himself most. ‘Goetz’ is full of 
faults, “ but there is a life and a power in it, 
and it is not dull. This is what distinguishes 
it from Schiller’s ‘Robbers.’ The ‘Robbers’ is at 
once violent and tiresome. ‘Goetz’ is violent, 
but it is not tiresome.” 

The one long article devoted exclusively to 
things theatrical is the ‘French Play in London,’ 
written in 1870, and reprinted in ‘Irish Essays,’— 
a volume in which it finds itself strangely out of 
place in its enforced companionship with half-a- 
dozen sprightly specimens of political polemic. 
The ‘French Play in London’ is one of the clever- 
est of Arnold’s essays, and one of the most charm- 
ing. It is also one of the most valuable, rich 
in matter, graceful and urbane in manner, witty 
in expression and wise in outlook. It reveals 
Arnold’s genuine appreciation of the drama as a 
literary form,—and it discloses also his under- 
standing of the art of acting, by which only is the 
drama made vital. 

The Comédie-Francaise was then in the pleni- 
tude of its superiority over all other histrionic ag- 
gregations. It possest a company of comedians 
probably unequalled in France before or since, and 
certainly unequalled in England,—except possibly 
at Drury Lane in the early years of Sheridan’s 

275 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


management, when the ‘School for Scandal’ was 
“in all its glory,’ as Charles Lamb said. The 
boards of the Théatre Francais were nightly trod 
by Got and Coquelin, by Thiron, Barré and 
Febvre, by Sarah-Bernhardt and Croizette, by 
Barretta and Jouassain. In comedy, in Moliére, 
Beaumarchais and Augier, it was incomparable; in 
Hugo it was superb; and even if it was not so 
superb in Corneille and Racine, it was at least 
far more than adequate. 

Although Arnold began by declaring that he 
did not propose to analize the artistic accomplish- 
ment of the several members of this galaxy of 
stars, he did allow himself one excursus into purely 
histrionic criticism,—an excursus which proved 
both his insight and his foresight. He pointed 
out—and this was in 1879—the fatal defect in the 
equipment of Sarah-Bernhardt, a defect which was 
to be made painfully manifest in the ensuing 
thirty years:—“ One remark I will make, a remark 
suggested by the inevitable comparison of Mlle. 
Sarah-Bernhardt with Rachel. One talks vaguely 
of genius, but I had never till now comprehended 
how much of Rachel’s superiority was purely in 
intellectual power, how eminently this power 
counts in the actor’s art as in all arts, how just 
is the instinct which led the Greeks to mark 
with a high and severe stamp the Muses. Tem- 
perament and quick intelligence, passion, ner- 
vous mobility, grace, smile, voice, charm, poet- 
ry,—Mlle. Sarah-Bernhardt has them all. One 

276 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


watches her with pleasure, with admiration,— 
and yet not without a secret disquietude. Some- 
thing is wanting, or, at least, not present in 
sufficient force, something which alone can secure 
and fix her administration of all the charming 
gifts which she has, can alone keep them fresh, 
keep them sincere, save them from perils by ca- 
price, perils by mannerism. That something is 
high intellectual power. It was here that Rachel 
was so great; she began, one says to oneself as 
one recalls her image and dwells upon it,—she ~ 
began almost where Mlle. Sarah-Bernhardt ends.” 

A little later in his essay, Arnold, as was his 
wont, and in accord with what Brownell has called 
his “missionary spirit,” askt what was the moral 
to be drawn by us who speak English from the 
opportunity to study the best that the French 
stage had to offer. He digrest to point out that 
Victor Hugo is not “a poet of the race and lineage 
of Shakspere’”’, as Swinburne had rashly asserted 
in one of his characteristically dithyrambic rhap- 
sodies. Arnold dwelt also on the inferiority of the 
rimed French alexandrine to English blank verse 
and to the Greek iambic as a poetic instrument 
for dramatic use. “Victor Hugo is said to be 
a cunning and mighty artist in alexandrines, 
and so unquestionably he is; but he is an artist 
in a form radically inadequate and inferior, and 
in which a drama like that of Sophocles. or 
Shakspere is impossible.” 

Then Arnold, writing in 1879, it must be again 

277 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


recalled, declared that “we in England have no 
modern drama at all. We have our Elizabethan 
drama”’ and eighteenth-century comedy. “Then 
we have numberless imitations and adaptations 
from the French. All of these are at bottom fan- 
tastic,”’—because the result of putting French 
wine into English bottles is to give to the attentive 
observer “a sense of incurable falsity in the piece 
as adapted.” To this point Arnold was to recur 
again in one of his ‘Letters of an Old Playgoer.’ 
Yet even at this moment, when the English lan- 
guage had no drama dealing with life of the Eng- 
lish-speaking peoples, these peoples were revealing 
a steadily increasing interest in the theater. 
“T see our community turning to the theater with 
eagerness, and finding the English theater with- 
out organization or purpose, or dignity,—and no 
modern English drama at all except a fantastical 
one. And then I see the French company from 
the chief theater of Paris showing themselves to 
us in London,—a society of actors, admirable in 
organization, purpose and dignity, with a modern 
drama not fantastic at all, but corresponding 
with fidelity to a very palpable and powerful 
ideal.” | 

He askt “What is the consequence which it is 
right and rational for us to draw? Surely it is 
this: ‘The theater is irresistible; organize the 
theater.””’ And then he outlined a method of 
organization which would provide London with 

278 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


a company of actors worthy of consideration by 
the side of the company which had come over from 
Paris. When this is once done a modern drama 
“will also, probably, spring up”’ ;—that is to say, 
Arnold hoped that an adequate and working or- 
ganization of the theater would bring about a 
new birth in the English drama. And the event 
proved that the second of these hopes was to be 
fulfilled without being preceded by any effort to 
attain the first. The English theater is not yet 
“organized” in accord with Arnold’s suggestions; 
but the English language has developt a modern 
drama, not adapted from the French and there- 
fore not fantastic at all, but corresponding with 
more or less fidelity to a palpable and powerful 
ideal. The beginnings of this revivification of 
the English drama were already visible in 1879, 
altho they were a little more obviously visible 
five years later, in 1884, when Arnold wrote the 
fifth and final of his ‘Letters of an Old Playgoer.’ 


IV 


THE first of these letters was the result of an 
invitation from Henry Arthur Jones to attend the 
first performance of the ‘Silver King’ on Novem- 
ber 16, 1882; and the other four followed at ir- 
regular intervals during the next two years, called 
forth by one or another of the “current attrac- 
tions” at the London theaters. It is plain enough 

279 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


that he enjoyed writing them, pleased at the new 
opportunity to apply the old doctrine and glad to 
note the signs of the coming of a modern English 
drama, slowly purging itself of fantasticality. 
When Morley exprest his liking for these letters, 
Arnold called them “the last flicker of a nearly 
exhausted rushlight.”” Yet they still have illu- 
mination for us, more than thirty years later. They 
deal with both of the aspects of the double art 
of the drama, with the plays themselves and with 
the performers who made them live at the mo- 
ment. They disclose Arnold’s constant sanity, 
his penetrating shrewdness, his ability to see the 
thing as it is, his cogency of presentation, his 
power of drawing out the principle from the prac- 
tice, and his insistence on finding the moral latent 
in every manifestation of art. 

In the performance of the ‘Silver King’ Arnold 
noted “the high general level of the acting,’”’ and 
he contrasted this with his memories of thirty-five 
years earlier when Macready was acting his 
great Shaksperian parts, supported by two or 
three middling actors, “and the rest moping and 
mowing in what was not to be called English but 
rather stagese,”,—a remark to be recommended 
to the consideration of those praisers of past times 
who still talk of the palmy days and who affect 
to believe that the level of acting is lower than it 
was when the old stock-companies strutted to half- 
empty houses in dingy and shabby theaters. 

280 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


He found that the ‘Silver King’ was an honest 
melodrama, relying “for its main effect on 
an outer drama of sensational incidents,” that is to 
say, upon its external action, rather than on its 
characters. But melodrama as it was in its struc- 
ture, the ‘Silver King’ was not melodramatic in 
its dialog. “In general thruout the piece the dic- 
tion and the sentiments are natural; they have 
sobriety and propriety; they are literature.” 

In the second and third letters he dealt with 
three comedy-dramas, ‘Forget-me-not’ by Grove 
and Merivale, “A Great Catch’ by Hamilton Aidé, 
and ‘Impulse’ by Charles Stephenson. The 
plays of Aidé and of Grove and Merivale were 
evidences of the immediate development of a 
modern drama in England, far superior in veracity 
and in execution to the adaptations which had 
held the stage in London half-a-century earlier. 
Arnold credited ‘“Forget-me-not’ with dialog 
“always pointed and smart, sometimes quite 
brilliant”; and he declared that “the piece has 
its life from its ability and verve.” But with his 
usual insight he could not fail to see that its 
action lackt an adequate motive. In this re- 
spect ‘A Great Catch’ was more satisfactory; 
yet once again he was able to put his finger on 
the defect; one of the most important characters 
was inadequately developt. Here Arnold’s criti- 
cism is purely technical; and it is sound and useful. 
Then he gave high praise to the admirable acting 


281 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


of Genevieve Ward, an American who had taken a 
foremost position on the English stage. 

‘Impulse,’ he did not like at all: “‘a piece more 
unprofitable it is hard to imagine.” Stephenson’s 
play was a flagrant example of the fantasticality, 
of the incurable falsity, likely to result from the 
dislocation of a plot essentially French in an ab- 
surd effort to adjust it to social conditions essen- 
tially English. The story no longer represents 
French life and it misrepresents English life; 
it becomes “something half-true, factitious and 
unmeaning.” So the play is “intensely disagree- 
able,” achieving success because of the acting 
of the two chief parts, because of “the singularly 
attractive, sympathetic and popular personalities 
of Mr. and Mrs. Kendal; while they are on the 
stage it is hard to be dissatisfied.” 

The three plays considered in the first two let- 
ters were evidences that dramatists were coming 
forward in England who were capable not only of 
invention and construction, but who were pos- 
sest also of a sincere desire to deal with life as 
they severally saw it; and the single play consid- 
ered in the third letter was evidence that the 
public had not yet experienced a change of heart 
and still lingered in the condition when it could be 
amused by insincere adaptations. In the fourth 
and fifth letters Arnold had worthier topics. The 
fourth letter was devoted to Henry Irving’s 
sumptuous and brilliant presentation of ‘Much 

282 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


Ado About Nothing’; and the fifth and final letter, 
the only one written after his visit to America, 
after his voyage across “the unplumbed, salt, 
estranging sea,’ was devoted to Wilson Barrett’s 
ambitious presentation of ‘Hamlet.’ 

Arnold asserted that ‘Much Ado’ was beauti- 
fully put upon the stage, which “greatly heightens 
the charm of ideal comedy.’ He declared also 
that it was “acted with an evenness, a general 
level of merit which was not to be found twenty- 
five years ago.” He discovered in Henry Irving 
and also in Ellen Terry “a personality which 
peculiarly fits them for ideal comedy. Miss 
Terry is sometimes restless and over-excited; but 
she has a spirited vivacity which is charming. 
Mr. Irving has faults which have often been 
pointed out; but he has, as an actor, a merit 
which redeems them all, and which is the secret 
of his success: the merit of delicacy and distinc- 
tion. ... Mankind are often unjust to this 
merit, and most of us much resist having to ex- 
hibit it in our own life and soul; but it is singular 
what a charm it exercises over us.” 

Arnold begins his criticism on Wilson Barrett’s 
Hamlet with a discussion of the tragedy itself 
and with the influence exerted upon Shakspere 
himself at the very moment of its composition 
by Montaigne. This leads him to the rather 
strange conclusion that ‘Hamlet’ is “not a drama 
followed with perfect comprehension and pro- 

283 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


foundest emotion, which is the ideal for tragedy, 
but a problem, soliciting interpretation and solu- 
tion. It will never, therefore, be a piece to be 
seen with pure satisfaction by those who will 
not deceive themselves. But such is its power and 
such is its fame that it will always continue to be 
acted, and we shall all of us continue to go to see 
it.” Then the critic turns to the acting, praising 
E. S. Willard’s Claudius and finding Wilson Bar- 
rett’s Hamlet “fresh, natural, young, prepossess- 
ing, animated, coherent, the piece moves. All 
Hamlets I have seen dissatisfy us in something. 
Macready wanted person, Charles Kean mind, 
Fechter English; Mr. Wilson Barrett wants elo- 
cution.” 


Vv 


As we read these ‘Letters of An Old Playgoer’ 
we cannot help noting three things; first, Arnold’s 
alert interest in the drama as an art and his in- 
sight into its principles; second, his equally alert 
interest in acting and his understanding of its 
methods,—an understanding quite unusual among 
men of letters, who are generally even more at sea 
in discussing the histrionic art than they are in dis- 
cussing the arts of the painter, the sculptor, and 
the architect. And it is significant that Arnold’s 
own appreciation of dramaturgic and histrionic 
craftsmanship was not accompanied by any corre- 
spondingly acute appreciation of either pictorial 

284 


MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE THEATER 


or plastic skill, in the manifestations of which he 
seems never to have been greatly interested, even 
during his visits to Italy and France. 

The third thing we note is that Arnold retained 
his openmindedness and his freshness of impres- 
sion. He was sixty when he turned aside to con- 
sider the improving conditions of the English 
theater, the advance in English acting and the 
beginnings of the modern English drama; but he 
revealed none of the customary sexagenarian 
proneness to look back longingly to the days of 
his youth, and to bewail the degeneracy discover- 
able in the years of his old age. He was quick 
to see progress and frank in acknowledging its 
presence. Perhaps his openmindedness in _ his 
maturity was in some measure due to his early 
and severe training in Greek and to his absorption 
of the free Greek spirit, which secured him against 
pedantry and kept his vision unimpaired. 


(1916.) 


285 


XVI 
MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


I 


Y earliest recollection of Edwin Booth goes 
back to 1865, when I was taken to the 
Winter Garden Theater to see one of the hundred 
consecutive performances of ‘Hamlet’—the long- 
est run that any play of Shakspere’s had ever had 
(up to that time) in any city in the world. | find 
that all I can recall of the play, then seen for the 
first time, is a misty memory of the moonlit 
battlements of Elsinore with the gray figure of the 
Ghost as he solemnly stalkt forward. A few 
weeks later in that same winter I was allowed to 
see Booth again, as Richelieu; and I can more 
readily recapture the thrill with which I heard 
him threaten to launch the curse of Rome. | 
have an impression that the scenery for ‘ Riche- 
lieu’ had been painted in Paris; and I think that 
even now after the lapse of more than half-a- 
century I can visualize the spacious and beautiful 
hall in which Richelieu had his interview with 
Marion Delorme. 
In 1869, when I was scant seventeen, | had the 
good fortune to be present at the opening of 
286 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


Booth’s own theater, the handsomest playhouse 
which had ever been erected in New York and 
the most elaborately equipt. The play was 
“Romeo and Juliet’; and the part of the impulsive 
heroine was taken by Mary McVickar, whom 
Booth was soon to marry. The only picture still 
imprinted on my memory is the lovely garden, 
flooded with moonlight, as Juliet appeared on the 
balcony and as Romeo lightly overleapt the walls. 

After | attained to man’s estate I saw Booth in 
all his great parts—excepting only Richard II, 
which he did not long retain in his repertory. 
The sinister malignity of his Pescara (in Shiel’s 
‘“Apostate’) has etcht itself in my memory; 
and so also has the demoniac dance of Bertuccio 
(in the ‘Fool’s Revenge’) when the deeply out- 
raged jester believes that he has been able at 
last to repay in full the injury he had received from 
his enemy. As the audience knows that it is not 
his enemy’s wife but his own beloved daughter 
that he has just helpt to abduct, the tragic 
irony of the poignant situation was intensified by” 
the few irrepressible capers of the hunchback, an 
effect as daring as it was successful, and possible 
only to an actor of imagination and of unfailing 
certainty of execution. 

Altho I saw Edwin Booth often on the stage | 
did not have the pleasure of making his acquain- 
tance until about 1884, three or four years before 
he founded The Players,—which opened its doors 

287 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


just before midnight on the last day of 1888. 
One of my good friends, Laurence Hutton was a 
good friend of Booth’s; and when Hutton and I, 
Lawrence Barrett, Frank Millet and E. A. Abbey 
organized a little dinner club, called The Kins- 
men, Booth was one of the first of the practition- 
ers of the several allied arts whom we askt to 
join us. In private life he was unaffected and 
unassuming, gentle, simple, modest,—altho he 
was naturally dignified and altho he could not 
but be conscious of his position at the head of the 
American stage. 

It has been my privilege to know fairly well the 
leaders of the dramatic profession, in the later 
years of the nineteenth century, Booth and Irv- 
ing, Jefferson and Coquelin, Salvini and Barnay; 
they were none of them openly vainglorious or 
even unduly self-centered; and perhaps Booth 
was the least pretentious of them all. He had 
the saving sense of humor; and while he took his 
work seriously he did not take himself too seri- 
ously. In fact, when I read his familiar corre- 
spondence, lovingly set in order by his devoted 
daughter, I recognized the man disclosed in these 
letters as the very man whose characteristics 
Sargent captured and fixt forever in the illuminat- 
ing portrait which E. C. Benedict presented to 
The Players. There was a certain transparency 
about his character; and in private life his per- 
sonality was very winning—a quality which on the 

288 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


stage transmuted itself into what is often termed 
“magnetism.” 


II 


AT the supper which The Kinsmen gave when 
we welcomed Irving as a member,—it had to bea 
supper and not a dinner since Irving was acting 
every night—chance placed me at table be- 
tween Booth and Irving. I noted with apprecia- 
tion the high friendliness of their association, de- 
void of any suspicion of jealousy or even of rivalry, 
altho one of them was the acknowledged leader of 
the American stage and the other was the undis- 
puted chief of the British theater. It was evident 
that their cordiality was not put on for the occa- 
sion only and that they really liked one another 
and were glad to foregather for the interchange 
of experiences. Of course, their talk soon 
turned to their profession and to the mighty 
actors who had preceded them. I soon discovered 
that Irving had never been greatly interested in 
the performers of an earlier generation; he was 
familiar enough with the careers of Macready 
and of Charles Kean, who were his immediate 
predecessors, but he had not cared to study the 
lives of Edmund Kean, of George Frederick Cooke 
and of the Kembles, who had been the leaders of 
the stage two generations earlier. Of course, it is 
never necessary for an artist to be a student of 
the biographical history of his art; for him it is 

289 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


sufficient if he has spent his strength on mastering 
its principles and in training himself to apply 
them. 

Booth’s devotion to the memory of his father, 
the Junius Brutus Booth who had been hailed as 
a rival of Edmund Kean, had lured him into the 
study of the lives of all of his father’s more im- 
portant contemporaries. While he could not be 
called a bookish man, he owned most of the vol- 
umes of histrionic criticism and of theatrical 
biography which elucidate the history of the 
English-speaking stage in the first half of the 
nineteenth century. Not only did he own them, 
he had read them; and by their aid his father’s 
fellow-players had become living men to him. 
He had accumulated anecdotes about them and 
he had studied out their methods. As he had 
found this reading instructive as well as interest- 
ing he assumed that Irving had done the same; 
and in reviving these half-forgotten figures, al- 
ready going into the night, one and all, Booth 
frankly took for granted Irving’s equal intimacy 
with them. Apparently Irving saw no reason to 
undeceive him, and without in any way pretending 
to an exhaustive acquaintance with careers of his 
renowned predecessors, he was able to throw in 
from time to time an apt anecdote,—which had 
probably come to him by oral tradition. 

Booth was three years older than Irving; in 
1861 when he was not yet thirty and already a 

290 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


star of proclaimed promise, he paid his first pro- 
fessional visit to England; and in Manchester, 
Irving, then only an obscure stock actor, sup- 
ported him. A score of years later when Irving 
was the prosperous manager of the foremost 
theater in England, Booth again ventured across 
the Atlantic to act in London. His season was 
none too successful financially, partly because he 
had unwisely allowed himself to be taken to the 
wrong theater. With characteristic kindliness 
Irving invited Booth to join him for a month at 
the Lyceum to alternate the characters of Othello 
and Iago and to have the aid of Ellen Terry as 
Desdemona. This was in the spring of 1881; 
and for four weeks the Lyceum was crowded to 
its full capacity. 

A friend of mine, who had played one of the 
parts in the tragedy, described the rehearsals to 
me and dwelt on the unfailing courtesy with which 
Irving, as the host, sought always to make Booth, 
as the guest, feel at home. Whenever they came 
to a scene in which Booth appeared, Irving would 
ask how he would prefer to have the action ar- 
ranged; and with equal courtesy Booth would 
leave the settling of the business to Irving, sug- 
gesting only when it was necessary. “This is 
the way I usually doit.” My friend noticed that 
Irving seemed surprized, and perhaps even a little 
shockt, that Booth set so little store by the details 
of stage-management. And here the most markt 

291 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


difference between these two great actors stood 
revealed. 

Booth was an actor, first of all, and he was a 
stage-manager only in so far as stage manage- 
ment might be necessary for the effect which he 
himself desired to make as an actor. Perhaps it 
would not be fair to say that Irving was primarily 
a stage-manager; but it is not unfair to suggest 
that he was a stage-manager of extraordinary 
fertility of invention and that he was accustomed 
to use his skill as a stage-manager to support his 
efforts as an actor. Booth was always careful 
about his own effects, his own business; but he 
relied mainly on himself and upon his own individ- 
ual power as an actor. So it was that he was less 
interested in the play as a whole and in those 
scenes in which he did not himself appear. Irving, 
on the other hand, was insistent in getting the 
smallest details exactly to his taste, holding with 
Michael Angelo that “trifles make perfection, 
and perfection is no trifle.”” Perhaps this differ- 
ence in their attitude explains why it was that 
Booth was unsuccessful in the management of 
the theater he had built for himself and that 
Irving managed his theater triumphantly for 
more than a score of years. 

It is possible that Irving never himself per- 
ceived how truly magnanimous he had been in 
inviting Booth to appear with him at the Lyceum. 
In the first week when Booth was Othello and 

292 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


Irving Iago there was a comparative equality 
between them. Booth had the amplitude of 
elocution and the fiery passion which Othello de- 
manded; and Irving was a brilliant and pic- 
turesque Iago. But the second week, when they 
exchanged parts, the comparative equality dis- 
appeared. Fine as Booth was as Othello he was 
even finer as Iago, whom he represented as the 
incarnation of implacable malignity, whereas 
Irving lackt the simple utterance and the mas- 
sive emotion required for the adequate perform- 
ance of Othello. It would be going too far to 
suggest that Irving failed as Othello; he was too 
clever, too experienced and too richly endowed 
to fail in anything he undertook. Yet it may be 
said not unfairly that his Othello was among 
the least successful of his Shaksperian characters, 
ranking with his spasmodic Romeo and far below 
his graceful and noble Hamlet. 


Ill 


Ir was after Irving’s first visit to the United 
States that he took part in a discussion with Co- 
quelin as to the completeness with which the 
actor ought actually to feel the emotion he is ex- 
pressing. Coquelin had declared that Diderot’s 
“Paradox on Acting’—to the effect that the per- 
former must have felt the emotion while he is 
studying the part but that he must not feel it 

293 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


too acutely on the stage or it will interfere with 
his certainty of execution—Coquelin had declared 
that this was not a paradox, but only a plain 
statement of the indisputable fact. Irving had 
denied this, asserting that the actor needs to be 
moved by the actual passion when he is express- 
ing it. I recall that Joseph Jefferson told me 
that he thought they were both right, each from 
his own point of view, and each advocating the 
method he himself had found satisfactory—Co- 
quelin merely recalling the emotion he had origi- 
nally felt and Irving allowing himself to feel it 
again and again as amply as he could. 

When I spoke to Booth about Diderot’s ‘ Para- 
dox,’ he said that he thought that there was more 
in it than Irving was willing to admit; and he 
illustrated this opinion by an experience of his 
own. One night when he was acting in the 
‘Fool’s Revenge,’ he saw his daughter sitting in a 
stage-box; and this reminded him that he, like 
Bertuccio, had an only daughter whom he loved 
devotedly. This thought kept recurring as the 
play advanced; and he was conscious that his 
own paternal affection was making him identify 
himself more than ever before with the hunch- 
back father whom he was portraying. He found 
that he was putting himself into the place of Ber- 
tuccio and asking how he would feel if his own 
daughter, then before his eyes, had the sorrowful 
fate of the heroine of the play. It had seemed 

294 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


to him that, as a result of this intensified per- 
sonal emotion, he had never acted the character 
with so much poignancy of pathos. Yet when his 
daughter took him home in a carriage, she askt 
what had been the matter with him that evening, 
since she had never seen him impersonate Ber- 
tuccio so ineffectively. Here was a case where 
excess of actual feeling had interfered with the 
self-control needed for the complete artistic ex- 
pression of the emotion. 

Irving may have exprest his opinion with more 
emphasis than was warranted; and Coquelin was 
quite as intolerant in maintaining his. I must 
confess that I thought Coquelin a little extreme in 
his insistence on the necessity of absolute freedom 
from emotion when the actor was before the audi- 
ence. In one of our many talks about the art of 
acting, he once went so far as to assert that after 
he had seen a certain actress shed real tears at a 
moment of emotional tension, this accomplisht 
performer immediately sank in his estimation, 
since her weeping seemed to him to reveal an 
absence of the complete self-control which a fine 
artist ought always to possess. 

Booth’s famous father, so his son has recorded, 
endeavored always to sink his own personality 
in that of the character he was performing. 
“Whatever the part he had to impersonate, he 
was, from the time of its rehearsal until he slept 
at night, imbued with its very essence. If 

295 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


‘Othello’ was billed for the evening, he would, per- 
haps, wear a crescent pin on his breast that day. 

If Shylock was to be his part at night, he 
was a Jew all day; and, if in Baltimore at the 
time, he would pass hours with a learned Israelite, 
discussing Hebrew history.” During the actual 
performance of one of these mighty characters 
with which he had thus sought to identify him- 
self, he was possest by the passion which surged 
from the progressive situations of the play. “At 
the instant of intense emotion, when the specta- 
tors were enthralled by his magnetic influence 
. . . he would whisper some silliness or make a 
face” while his head was turned from the audience. 
His fellow-actors attributed his conduct at such 
times to lack of feeling, whereas it was in reality, 
so Edwin Booth testified, due to his “extreme 
excess of feeling.” 


IV 


In 1884 Laurence Hutton and I made prepara- 
tions to edit a book about the theater upon a 
novel plan; and a year or two later we sent forth 
at intervals the five volumes entitled ‘Actors and 
Actresses of Great Britain and the United States, 
from the days of David Garrick to the present 
time.’ We carefully selected about eighty per- 
formers of acknowledged prominence, each in his 
own generation; and we wrote ourselves or had 
written by experts in histrionic history, brief but 

296 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


carefully documented biographies, appending to 
the sketch of every performer’s career excerpts 
from contemporary dramatic criticism, from mem- 
oirs and reminiscences, and from collections of 
theatrical anecdotes, so as to depict from several 
angles the men and women who were sitting for 
their portraits. Our friends came generously to 
our assistance, more especially those devoted 
students of stage-history, William Winter and 
William Archer. Austin Dobson enricht our first 
volume with a delightful account of the varied 
activities of David Garrick; and H.C. Bunner 
contributed to our fifth volume an equally de- 
lightful account of Joseph Jefferson. 

The article on Edwin Booth was prepared by 
Lawrence Barrett; and Edwin Booth himself was 
to prepare that on his father. Irving willingly 
agreed, to write the paper on Edmund Kean; but 
when the time came he askt us to release him 
from his promise. So we turned to Edwin Booth 
again and requested him to give us the sketch of 
Kean to accompany that which he had already 
written on Kean’s sometime rival, Junius Brutus 
Booth; and he allowed himself to be persuaded. 
I think that the writing of these two papers was 
Edwin Booth’s first venture into literature, since 
his valuable notes on the acting of Othello and of 
Shylock were prepared a little later. To write 
was for him a novel experience, and he was 
modestly diffident, postponing the unwonted 

297 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


task until at last the spirit moved him; then he 
sat himself down to the work and poured forth his 
unpremeditated recollections of his father with the 
precipitancy with which he might write a letter. 

Even after he had set down what was in his 
heart he hesitated to let the manuscript pass out 
of his own hands. When Hutton was at last em- 
powered to carry it off, he brought it to me; 
and it made glad our editorial souls. It was not 
at all in accord with the pattern accepted by the 
professional writers who had prepared the articles 
for the earlier volumes. It did not give the facts 
of its subject’s career in strict chronological se- 
quence, with the obligatory dates in their proper 
places. It contained no dates and only a few 
facts; but it did give what was better than all the 
panoply of information,—an illuminating inter- 
pretation of an extraordinary character by the 
one person who knew him best and loved him 
most. 

It was thrown on paper in haste; it had not 
been modified by second thoughts; its sentences 
were sometimes entangled; and its punctuation 
was eccentric. But these external inadvertences 
were negligible. To precede Booth’s tribute to 
his father and to be distinguisht from it by a 
difference of type, we prepared an outline biog- 
raphy of Junius Brutus with all the missing facts 
and all the obligatory dates; and we then had 
Booth’s own manuscript copied faithfully, where- 

298 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


upon we made the few adjustments necessary to 
bring it into conformity with the conventions 
of literature. The result stood forth as an ad- 
mirable piece of writing, individual in expression, 
full of flavor, and rich in sympathetic understand- 
ing. It may be noted that actors, when they can 
write at all, generally write well, perhaps because 
their profession has trained them to avoid prolix- 
ity while its practice has stored their memory 
with a vocabulary as varied as it is vigorous. 

Encouraged by our editorial appreciation, Ed- 
win Booth wrote out for us his impressions of 
Kean, inspired in some measure by the study of 
Kean’s death-mask. He told us that altho Ed- 
mund Kean and Junius Brutus Booth had been 
rivals in London, there was no personal enmity in 
their contest for the crown, and when they came 
together again in America their meeting was not 
only friendly but cordial. That the two great 
actors were not hostile to each other was made 
certain by this glowing tribute to Edmund Kean 
written by the son of Junius Brutus Booth, as it 
had been made probable years before by the ap- 
pearance of Junius Brutus Booth as the Second 
Actor in support of the Hamlet of Edmund Kean’s 
son. 

Doubtful as Edwin Booth had been as to his 
ability to put on paper adequately his impressions 
of Kean and Booth, he was keenly interested in 
their reception by his friends after they were 

299 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


printed in the third volume of our ‘Actors and 
Actresses.’ In the correspondence lovingly col- 
lected by his daughter he is constantly mention- 
ing his “little sketches,”’ anxious to learn what his 
friends thought of them. As an actor he was sur- 
feited with newspaper criticism and he had come 
to pay little attention to it; but as a writer he 
wanted to see every journalistic review of our 
volume which might comment on his two contri- 
butions. It is amusing; in fact, it is almost 
pathetic, to note the new interest which the 
writing of these two articles had brought into his 
life when he was beginning to be wearied, and to 
observe the eagerness with which he awaited any 
casual comment on what he had written. I am 
glad to be able to record that the two brief essays 
were highly valued by those most competent to 
appreciate them. 


V 


OnE of the most intelligent and accomplisht 
actors of the present day has made it a rule not 
to read the incessant newspaper notices of his per- 
formance; and he once gave me an excellent rea- 
son for his decision:—“If the criticism is un- 
friendly, it is likely to disturb me at my work,— 
and if it is friendly it is likely to increase my 
natural conceit!’’ [| think that this would have 
won the approval of Edwin Booth. I recall 
that when I once askt him if he had ever been 

300 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


benefited by any of the criticisms of his acting, 
he responded at once “Never!” Then, after a 
moment’s pause and with his good-humored smile 
he added, “That’s not quite true. Sometimes, in 
one of the little cities, the theatrical critic points 
out that I have been careless in the performance 
of this scene or that; and sometimes I have seen 
that he was right. But that is the only benefit 
I ever got from anything of the sort.” 

He held that it was not good for the actor to 
associate with those whose duty it was to criticize 
his artistic endeavors. For this reason he sug- 
gested that critics of acting should not be ad- 
mitted to The Players; and to this day and after 
thirty years that is the unwritten law of the club 
he founded. He regretted greatly that this rul- 
ing excluded his cherisht friend, William Win- 
ter; but he did not wish us to make a single 
exception. I believe that it was in his thought 
that it would be unfortunate if the actor should 
be tempted to make up to the critics and to get 
on the blind side of them, so tospeak. Perhaps he 
had also in mind two other reasons for his request. 
The first is that artists of all kinds, and perhaps 
the actors more especially, are prone to express 
exaggerated opinions of one another’s work, 
opinions extravagantly favorable and some- 
times extravagantly unfavorable ;—opinions which 
it would be undesirable to have overheard by out- 
siders. And the second is that as the actor’s 

301 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


canvas on which he paints his picture and the 
actor’s clay with which he models his statue, are 
his own person, his own features, his own members, 
any criticism of his achievement, or of his failure 
to achieve, is necessarily personal,—possibly so 
personal as to make it unpleasant for artist and 
critic to have to sit at meat together. 

It was after he made his home at The Players— 
where the room in which he lived and died is 
piously kept exactly as he left it—that I had more 
frequent opportunities of meeting him. He 
liked to come down to the reading-room and the 
dining-room and to mingle freely with his fellow- 
members, and to have them accept him as one of 
themselves and not set him apart as the Founder 
of the club. As it chanced he used to spend at 
least a portion of the later summers of his life 
with his daughter at Narragansett Pier, almost 
exactly opposite my own summer home. Some- 
times he came over to see us and sometimes we 
went over to call on him. 

[ regret now that I did not make notes of the 
more interesting things he said in one or another 
of our talks. | can recapture only a few of them. 
He told me that the conditions of the theater were 
very primitive when he first began to act in sup- 
port of his father; and in ‘Richard III,’ for in- 
stance, when the time came for Richard to fight 
Richmond, his father used to go to the wings on 
one side of the stage as the actor of Richmond 

302 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


went to the wings on the other side; and each of 
them seized by the hilt a combat-sword thrust 
out by an invisible stage-hand, whereupon they 
went back to the center of the stage and began 
their fight to the death. He also confest that 
he had been inclined to doubt the wisdom of his 
having discarded Colley Cibber’s perversion of 
‘Richard II1’—a fiery and bombastic adaptation 
which had held the stage for two centuries and 
which was really more effective theatrically than 
the reverent rearrangement of Shakspere’s own 
text which Booth had substituted for it. 

I happened once to mention Irving’s taking 
Ellen Terry and his whole company to West 
Point to play the ‘Merchant of Venice’ in the 
Mess Hall on a platform draped only with Amer- 
ican flags and therefore without any scenery; 
and I remarkt that Irving had assured me that 
the power of the play was in no wise lessened by 
the enforced deprivation of all decorative aid. 
To cap this Booth told me about his unexpected 
misadventure at Waterbury. He arrived at the -- 
theater to be informed that the costumes had 
not been delivered. Scenery and _ properties 
had come all right, but the trunks containing 
the dresses for ‘Hamlet’ could not be found. 
Booth inquired about the advance sale of tickets 
and learnt that every seat had been sold. “Very 
well, then,” he said, “we must not disappoint an 
audience. We'll give the play in the clothes we 

303 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


have on!’’ When the time came he sent the 
manager before the curtain to explain the situation 
and to announce that any spectator who was not 
satisfied with the prospect could have his money 
back from the box-office. 

“Of course, nobody left the house,’ he com- 
mented smiling. “But you should have seen the 
fright of the company—especially the women— 
at the idea of appearing in a Shaksperian tragedy 
in the dresses they wore to travel in. They got 
over that, as soon as they found that the effect 
of strangeness quickly wore off. After the first 
act, Robert Pateman, who did not appear as the 
Gravedigger until the fifth act, and who had 
gone in front to judge the effect, came round be- 
hind to reassure his wife, who was our Ophelia. 
He explained that there were little runs of 
laughter every now and then during the opening 
scenes but that these soon died down, until 
toward the end of the act the performance was ap- 
parently as effective as if we had all been garbed 
with historic propriety. It was an odd experience, 
—and perhaps the most amusing part of it was 
that the trunks containing the costumes were 
discovered at last in a heap outside the railroad 
station !”’ 

On another occasion he told me about a little 
discussion he had had with Jefferson when ‘Rip 
Van Winkle’ was first produced at Booth’s 
Uheater. He had wanted his old friend to be 

304 


MEMORIES OF EDWIN BOOTH 


pleased and he had prepared entirely new scenery. 
The set for the first act, the home from which Rip 
is to be driven out by his shrewish wife, was a 
careful reconstitution of a characteristic kitchen 
in a Catskill farmhouse, with a kettle swinging on 
a crane before a glowing fire. But at the dress 
rehearsal when Jefferson made his entrance, he 
stopt short and called out sharply “Take that 
thing away !’”’—that thing was the gas-log blazing 
brightly; “I don’t want people to be looking at 
that. I want them to look at me!” The re- 
hearsal waited while the objectionable distraction 
was removed. When the first act had been gone 
thru, Booth called Jefferson’s attention to the 
black gap where the log had been and he askt 
if that might not draw the eyes of the spectators 
away from Rip’s features. “Perhaps you are 
right,” Jefferson admitted; “have the log put 
back—but don’t light it. I don’t want it tosparkle 
and hiss.” 

Fifty years ago a gas-log was a novelty and it 
might have diverted the gaze and thereby inter- 
fered momentarily with the current of dramatic 
sympathy. Of course, it was not personal vanity, 
but a due respect for art, which led Jefferson to 
declare that he wanted people to look at him all 
the time. When he played Rip the true center of 
interest was Rip’s ever-changing countenance. 

Unless my memory plays me false it was in this 
same conversation with Booth that he told me of 

305 


THE PRINCIPLES OF PLAYMAKING 


a remark Charlotte Cushman had made to him 
when they were rehearsing ‘Macbeth.’ “You 
must not be afraid of overdoing the part,” she had 
said. “Remember that Macbeth is the father of 
all the stage-villains !” 


(1919.) 


306 





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